Andrew Solomon’s book, Far from the Tree is an intimate look at parents, children and identity, and it’s an exceptional read. Director Rachel Dretzin took on the mammoth task of making the film and succeeds with a thoroughly hopeful story as she follows unique families faced with challenges and embracing their special identities.
Rather than adapt the same stories already covered, Dretzin captures the essence and spirit of the book and finding new families and following them on journeys that will move you. The documentary looks at the struggles parents face, but its power comes in its themes of resilience and beauty.
I caught up with Rachel to talk about making the documentary and working with the families to earn their trust.
Well, my first question is, do you keep in touch with the subjects?
I do keep in touch with them. Very closely.
Far From The Tree is quite an epic book. What was your introduction to it?
I read the review of the book which was in the New York Times book review section and was taken with the concept. I read the book twice which was quite a feat. I was seized by the book and the notion of it. It was a film that I wanted to make. I approached Andrew Solomon at that point and learned there were a lot of people with the same idea so it was quite a competitive process to acquire the rights to the book. Andrew was appropriately very rigorous about his choice and it took him a long time to make a decision and ultimately, I was elated to be the one chosen to make the film.
The book is not a 200-page read.
It’s definitely not.
What did you tell Andrew about how you wanted to approach it?
I was just very honest with him and moved in a deep way by the book. We talked a lot about my concept for the film. He was aware it was not going to be an easy thing to do and I’ve always felt that rather than try to mimic the book and do a ginormous series and be exhaustive and encyclopedic how he was, that really what a film could do was capture the spirit and the essence of the book. The book is a really unique perspective and voice and that’s what I was really moved by and what I wanted to adapt to film.
We had a lot of talks about it and then he watched some of my other films and took his time and then he made his decision.
Then you have these great new stories. How did you find them?
The first decision we made was not to use the same stories that Andrew told in the book which was a very practical decision because the book had taken a decade to write and was also already out there. We wanted stories that were happening as we were filming and we could capture the height of the drama that was going on.
Once we made a decision to find families, my producer Jamila Ephron is wonderful and we did it together. It took about a year. We went to a lot of conferences at first such as one of Autism, another on The Little People of America Convention and places where different groups would gather and come together and we could meet a lot of people at one time. We’d usually come out of those with a list of people we were really interested in or taken by. We’d follow up with individual visits.
I would say with the families that are in the film, many of them we had met many times before we even turned the camera on and before we ever turned the camera on. It was much about the combination of the families as it was about the families themselves. We knew we could have only 5 or 6 families in the film and that they talked to each other and relate in an interesting way.
You mention the Little People’s Convention of America where we meet Leah and Joe. That’s such a beautiful story. Talk about that discovery?
Leah and Joe as you can tell are extraordinary. We met them separately, but we knew they were a couple. We were very wowed by both of them with their intelligence, confidence, and sense of humor. It was when we found out that they were planning on trying to have a baby that we thought it would be a really interesting story to follow. There were so many decisions for them to make and some of those are not in the film. We followed their efforts to have a baby probably for a good year because there were a few other missteps along the way. We had no idea how it was going to turn out and that’s one of the unsettling things about making a documentary, there are a lot of nail-biting moments.
We were so excited that they got pregnant and then have the baby.
Contrasting that, you have Trevor’s story.
Trevor’s story is the most difficult emotionally. It’s so different from the rest of the stories. It was the most difficult to shoot because it was also a difficult decision for the family to decide whether to participate in the first place. It took them a long time because they’d been underground since it happened. They really hadn’t shared with people in their lives and had moved. The process for them of deciding to come forward and go public was very painstaking. Once they did decide, it took them a long time to relax in front of the cameras and with us. Parents of children who are criminal often have a much greater stigma than parents of any kinds of children in our film because there’s a societal assumption that they must have had some role in their child’s deviant behavior and they must have done something to contribute to their child’s act. They understandably don’t trust that many people and we had to build trust over a long time and over many interviews with them. The moment when they really begin to relax and believe that we weren’t interested in judging them, that’s when they began to share in a real way.
Was that the biggest challenge in making the film, getting that story?
That was defiinitely one. That and integrating Andrew’s story. I knew I always wanted his story to be a part of the film. His perspective as a gay man who grew up in a time where being gay was seen by many as an illness that we needed to fix and watching society change so quickly. That was an important perspective in the film so I wanted him to be the thing that knit together the stories and give the audience some fruit for thought.
Doing that was challenging because the stories have a cinema vérité feel to them and we told Andrew’s story differently. We didn’t want it to take people out of the world of the characters, we wanted it to come up as interesting connective tissue and from a filmmaking perspective that was challenging.
I was going to ask you about the editing. As you say, the characters don’t really connect narratively, but you made it work with what you did.
Yes. For documentary filmmakers, those multiple character films are hard and when you don’t have anything connecting your characters, it’s tough. So, this was a long and difficult edit for sure.