It’s quite standard for someone to tell their life story in book form, but considerably less common for the same method to be employed in the filmed documentary. Most biographical docs in rotation involve various family members, friends, colleagues, and even enemies giving their own accounts of someone and usually only after that person has passed on from this life.
There are exceptions to this rule such as the legendary Errol Morris doc on former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, The Fog of War or one of my favourites, De Palma, where director Brian De Palma essentially sits in front of a camera and recounts his entire career up till 2015, illustrated by film clips.
On a more local note, first-time director Asher Penn has given renowned doctor and author Gabor Maté the opportunity to recount his own life from a child in war-town Hungary to UBC radical to addictions specialist serving Vancouver’s downtown eastside community. All this is recounted via a single interview with Gabor himself, illustrated with a generous amount of family films, news clips and even animation!
I recently sat down with Asher to discuss how his directorial debut came to be and the challenges therein:
What was the genesis of Physician, Heal Thyself?
I was getting sober and was reading Gabor Maté’s books a lot. I realised that there hadn’t been many documentaries about him made and I also realised that he was from my hometown of Vancouver.
So I made the weird decision to turn my recovery into a project which I don’t recommend. And it just so happened that because he was from Vancouver, my dad actually knew him personally. He was able to make an introduction and I was able to secure the interview.
But it took a long time. I’ve worked as a producer in the past and had never really made anything at this scale. So as I was kind of getting sober, getting my life together in little ways, this movie was incrementally completed over many years. It took a long time.
I’ll follow up on that particular question. The film is primarily centred on a single interview with Gabor himself where he’s candid about various sensitive topics. Was it difficult to get him to open up?
No. I got him at a very optimistic, open point. He had just gotten the deal for his new book The Myth of Normal and he hadn’t started working on it yet. I think that he was very willing to be an open book with me.
I also think that nobody had really approached him so much about the life story aspect of him. I think a lot of his interviews had been him making a lot of questions that are answered with “you” statements like “This is why you’re addicted”. This documentary was just him really making “I” statements and talking about himself.
There’s a point in the film where he seems quite reluctant to discuss a falling out with his wife Rae.
Yeah, for a moment. It’s interesting because I think he knew ultimately that what could be said of that would be of value and use. Like I said, I didn’t have to persuade him (laughs) or push him in any direction. He very willingly said everything he said. I’m just very lucky that he was that open.
Did you consider talking to anyone else in his life?
So what happened was that his wife Rae, his daughter Hannah, and his brother Janos all said “I don’t want to be interviewed for your documentary”. Once it was made clear that those people would be unavailable, I did not like the idea of working with such an incomplete picture. I can be pretty black-and-white sometimes, so my solution to that was saying “Cool, no other interviews!”.
I’m also a big fan of Errol Morris films, particularly The Fog of War. I was aware that you can make movies with an entire single narrator totally satisfying, so that was where I decided to go.
One aspect of the film that I was particularly taken by was the animated sequences. Can you tell us how those came about?
Our animators are amazing. We worked with this team. Greydon and Salome, who actually lived in the same building as my editor.
The drawings are my illustrations from a caricature I did of Gabor many years ago that kind of drew its inspiration from Charlie Brown. Although if I’m being totally honest, it’s just how I draw people!
It just became clear that there were gonna be points in the movie where I wasn’t gonna have a photo or video of Gabor and I needed some means of showing him in these moments (laughs). I was very lucky that something as simple as a walk cycle was enough to carry a scene at certain points.
I do remember a very fun moment when we were doing the edit where we’d found this incredible archive of all this Vancouver helicopter footage that was creative commons from Yaletown Productions. We were like “Man, it would be so cool to figure out an interesting way to use this” , and I remember asking my editor “What if we made him fly?”. He was like “Great! You can totally do that!” and within a day, we had mock-ups from the animators of “Super-Gabor” flying through the skies. It was so satisfying.
But yeah, it was a very economical solution to a lot of our problems of “How do we show him doing these things?”.
You have produced a feature before (Maggie Lee’s Mommy), but this is your first time in the director’s chair. Was it challenging taking on that role?
I think this movie has been a process of humility where I really thought that this movie was going to be a certain kind of way. I did not know how to make a movie. I did not know how to make this documentary. Before this, I’d been doing a lot of interviews and I felt fairly confident in my abilities that way.
But everything that I thought would be easy has been extremely difficult and I’m constantly surprised and humbled by how little I actually know.
Can you give an example of something that you found more difficult than expected?
I mean, this ranges from technical challenges to not understanding certain roles. I’d say one of the biggest challenges has been really staying consistent in my vision, but also open-minded. I really did believe in a single-narrator film that starts in the beginning of his life and ends at the present which some people would argue is quite conservative in its approach. Most movies these days are a mash-up and they jump around in time and I was really determined (not) to tell the story that way, for better or for worse. It was very challenging to stay true to that vision while at the same time being open to ways that the film and the story could improve.
But yeah, everything, everything was hard. It shouldn’t have been this hard, but it was very hard.
The film is pretty short at around 80 minutes. Were there chunks of Gabor’s story that ended up on the cutting room floor?
Tons got cut. Even four months ago, the movie was 100 minutes long and we did some pretty dramatic cuts in order to keep it expedient.
We abbreviated a lot about his work. There were certain moments where there just wasn’t enough time to cover it. We completely abbreviated his work with ayahuasca and hallucinogens. We skimmed over his work with parent-child relationships in terms of this book he co-wrote with Gordon Neufeld.
Gabor is extremely prolific. His life has many chapters and a lot of things couldn’t make it into the narrative in order to just keep it engaging.
VIFF is the film’s world premiere, correct?
Technically yes, although it’s also a hometown screening. Intriguingly enough, the opening scene of the movie where Gabor is giving a lecture is the exact same hall that he movie is premiering in (SFU Woodwards). So it’s an unusual full-circle, which is great also because I feel like it’s a Vancouver film made by Vancouverites that really tries to celebrate Vancouver as a city.
Has Gabor seen the film yet?
Yeah. Gabor has seen the film through various iterations. I mean, we couldn’t in good faith complete this film without his approval. He and his family have been incredibly generous with all the materials and I always saw this film as a bit of a collaboration. That was how we ended up with so much access and so much intimacy.
What do you hope audiences take away from this film?
I would say that one of the reasons that I like stories and I particularly like knowing other people’s stories is that it makes me feel a little less alone in the world. I think in this documentary, Gabor has been willing to talk about things that are not necessarily spoken, especially by people of his age. Though I do think that a lot of the challenges that he has faced and that he deals with, are somewhat universal.
So I just hope that it helps people feel a little less alone and that people are able to relate and identify and I hope they’re able to engage in the complexity of the story and who he is.
Any upcoming projects you’d like to talk about?
I’ve got some stuff that I’d love to make after this that are kind of ready to go, the majority of which are Vancouver stories that I’m particularly interested in. I would love to do another profile documentary.
I’ve reached out to a certain prominent Vancouver personality to see if he’d be interested in being the subject of a documentary, but I haven’t heard back from him. But there’s another project that I’m very enthusiastic about getting off the ground about a stand-up comedy class that takes place at Langara that I’d really love to do. If anybody reading this wants to make a stand-up comedy documentary set in Vancouver, let me know!
Physician, Heal Thyself screens as a part of VIFF on Thurs, Oct 5, 6pm @ SFU Woodwards