Chicago 10: forty years, full circle

Chicago 10 opens with footage of a United States president telling the American people of the need for more troops to fight the war. Protests ensue, and some turn violent. Rage Against The Machine blares in the background. The hook, of course, is that what we're seeing onscreen happened nearly 40 years ago.

Director Brett Morgen's movie is ostensibly about the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when police officers attacked anti-Vietnam war demonstrators. But, by shifting his focus to the subsequent trial of the colorful movement leaders, like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Tom Hayden, Morgen decontextualizes the story, seeking to make it less about the protests than the universal spirit of rebellion.

Like Morgen's previous film, The Kid Stays in the Picture, a spellbinding documentary about Hollywood producer Robert Evans, Chicago 10 eschews objectivity for a stylized approach to history. Here, Morgen mixes rarely-seen film of the protests with his own motion-capture animation of the trial, in which the participants are voiced by actors ranging from Nick Nolte and Hank Azaria to Mark Ruffalo and the late Roy Scheider. It's a daring approach and a clear effort to make this story of activism relevant to a new generation. The Muse spoke with Morgen about his film, its message, and what he hopes it might accomplish.

Muse: How did you decide where to begin with the Yippies' story and how far into the trial to go?

Brett Morgen: The movie is basically about a war and opposition to a war and a government trying to silence the opposition. So, the starting point for me was introducing the idea of the Vietnam War and the draft, and ultimately starting at the seeds of inspiration where the protests sprung from. One of the things that I found totally inspirational about this was that the Yippie protests in Chicago ultimately started with three guys sitting around in a loft in New York City smoking a joint. I thought it was an incredibly powerful statement that, really, anyone can create change in this country. These guys just had an idea. It's not like they had a degree in protesting. They said, "We've got to do something in Chicago," and they went and did it. And what they produced was one of the greatest pieces of political theatre ever staged on U.S. soil.

Muse: What this and The Kid Stays in the Picture have in common is that the stories are so unbelievable that the only way to tell them is an unconventional way, because otherwise you'd never accept them.

BM: I think style should be reflective of the subject of a film. With a movie like The Kid Stays in the Picture, I was not trying to make a movie about Robert Evans. I was trying to make a movie that is Bob Evans. And, if you come up with five or six words to describe the film, ultimately, you're describing Bob. These movies are very much steeped in mythology.

There's a line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the John Ford film: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." And that certainly was my mantra as I was doing The Kid Stays in the Picture. And, with Chicago 10, I strongly believe that history is interpretive. What happens is each generation gets a story and makes it their own. And then those stories get passed down from generation to generation, and they become myths and folklore. Chicago 10 is an attempt to redefine the mythology of Chicago.

Muse: There's been some contention about the objectivity or accuracy of Chicago 10. Frank Mankiewicz, who worked for George McGovern in 1972, said about Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, that it was "the least accurate but most truthful" account of the campaign. Is that what you were going for?

BM: Yeah, I think that's a good summation of it. To me, there is no place in art for objectivity. I don't really know if there is a place anywhere for objectivity, and I don't believe anyone can achieve objectivity. What we can achieve are truths, universal truths that resonate with us. With this film, I set out to -- yeah, no, I think I answered the question. Did I answer the question?

Muse: If you think you did, you did. You men-

tioned --

BM: Let me go off for a second. People confuse journalism with filmmaking. People would like to think that when they see a documentary that it is an objective truth. I'm sorry, but they're sadly mistaken. Culturally, we need to understand that any media that we read or learn or see or visualize is interpretive. And history is interpretive. And nobody owns history. Ultimately, with Chicago 10, I wasn't interested in a blind, clerical, fact-based retelling of the events. What I wanted to do was capture the energy of this moment in time and unleash it to an audience today…

There are a lot of ways to tell this story, and I chose to tell it in a way that I thought would resonate with my generation today. This is not a film about 1968. Let's be clear about this. This is as much a film about 1968 as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet is about the 1600s.

What I've done in this film is appropriate imagery and iconography from the '60s to tell a story about the times we're living in today. And I don't think any artist or writer or historian can tell a story about a time that predates them and have it be anything other than a reflection of the time they're living in.