Julie Loktev, second from left, with featured Russian journalists (L-R) Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olya Churakova at the 62nd New York Film Festival world premiere. Photo: Michael Taylor
Watching the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow last September in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, I knew I was experiencing a milestone in vérité documentary filmmaking.
Not because My Undesirable Friends was filmed using an iPhone per se. Filming with iPhones is a commonplace now, from this summer’s Danny Boyle hit, 28 Years Later, to Aardman’s latest Wallace & Gromit animation. Last April’s NAB show delivered booths full of iPhone cages, gimbals, adapters, and power banks. Apple’s popular “Shot on iPhone” campaign has been running since 2015.
Rather, My Undesirable Friends is a landmark work because techniques and methods latent in the iPhone’s size and its means of video capture have been developed and applied consistently by a true film artist, one who brings classic tenets of close, observational filmmaking to a larger historical canvas, albeit a wrenching one.
In filmmaking, technique derives from technology, what’s technically available at a given moment. Technical limitations that define one era inevitably make way for exciting, new techniques in the next. In the case of observational filmmaking, the primordial 16mm kit—camera with blimp, changing bag and spare mags; Nagra with mic and cables; and lighting with stands—had to make way for sensitive camcorders with built-in audio, lighting optional. This took little over three decades. Today’s digital cameras are leaps ahead, but somehow no less obtrusive, while boom mics continue to wave overhead—gadgets that, along with the crew needed to set up and run them, will always intrude on, if not contaminate, small moments. What happens when miniaturization and multi-functionality can do away with these, as well?
While the focus of Julia Loktev’s opus is intimate, even personal, its scale is epic. In five chapters and 324 minutes, Part I of My Undesirable Friends depicts the tenacity and ingenuity of independent journalists in Moscow, holding Putin’s feet to the fire during the period leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin, in turn, has these young journalists legally branded “foreign agents.” This is a story in which the frogs know all too well that the water is nearing a boil. Part II – Exile, of similar length, currently in editing, will portray these journalists rebuilding their lives and profession outside of Russia.
I happened to be staying at the home of 95-year-old documentary icon Frederick Wiseman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I found the time to re-watch all 5 1/2 hours of Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Naturally I invited Fred to watch it with me.
Before my conversation with Julia, I put Fred on the phone. Julia had no idea going into our discussion that I was staying at Fred Wiseman’s, or that he had seen her film.
Frederick Wiseman: Hi, Julia. I like the movie a lot. I thought it was great.
Julia Loktev: Thank you very much.
Frederick Wiseman: And I’m impressed how you did it with your iPhone. That’s amazing. I mean, it’s good, it’s an important movie. It’s opening at Film Forum?
Loktev: Yes.
Wiseman: I’m sure it’ll do very well. It’s the most important of subjects and it’s very well done.
Loktev: Thank you so much. This is such an honor to hear this from you. I have to tell you two small stories. Which is that, one, I cold-called you many, many years ago in the 80s when I was a 19-year-old college student. I somehow tracked down your phone number and asked you if you needed an intern. You told me you had nothing for me to do.
And I always tell a story about you, actually, because you played such an influence on me. After I finished film school at NYU, I made both fiction and documentaries, but my first film was a documentary, Moment of Impact. And I was sitting there with 40 hours of footage. I didn’t know what to do with it. Everyone was telling me to write things out and put together a treatment or something and figure it out. And that seemed wrong to me. You were having a retrospective at NYU then, and I came to hear you speak. I think it was after [a screening of] Titicut Follies.
I’m an incredibly shy person. And I’ve never in my life asked a question at a Q&A. But I raised my hand at your Q&A and I asked you, how do you edit? And you explained the entire process of kind of working with scenes unto themselves and spending a long time figuring out, just kind of distilling, each scene. I’m probably mangling your words, but, like, working with each scene and trying to find the essence of it, and then ordering them. And that’s something that has stayed with me.
I was probably 24 or so at that time, but it stayed with me my entire life as a filmmaker. And I always tell this story that it’s the only question I’ve ever asked at a Q&A. And it’s been one of the most influential answers of my life. So I just wanted to tell you thank you.
Wiseman: Well, thank you for telling me. I appreciate that. No, but you’re a really good filmmaker. I mean, it’s a great and important story, which you tell brilliantly. So I’d like to see other things that you’ve done.
David Leitner: So Fred, you don’t need an intern?
Wiseman: David made a good joke, but I think my filmmaking days are over.
[Note: Fred’s been busy acting. He just contributed cameos as a poet in Laura Piani’s Jane Austin Wrecked My Life, and as a psychiatrist opposite Jody Foster in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, both distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.]
Loktev: Well, you truly are just the hugest influence, and a giant of American cinema. And it’s just an honor to speak to you and an honor to have you watch my work.
Wiseman: Well, thank you.
Loktev: Thank you so much!
What follows is my conversation with Julia Loktev.
Leitner: I privately got a kick out of subjecting Fred to a long film, because he’s subjected his audiences to long films for years! He prides himself on being an editor, above all. And so when he turned to me and said, “This is very well cut, “ I wrote it down. Quoting him again, he also said your film is an “amazing work.” At another point, he said, “They’re all so bloody smart,” referring to all the lead characters in the film.
Loktev: Like I said, Fred has influenced my entire filmmaking career, because [his advice that day] changed the way I approached fiction as well as documentary. It forced me to approach the material not knowing. Because when I was making my first feature film, Moment of Impact, people were telling me to know the treatment as I went into editing. And I said, that’s bullshit. Why would I pretend to know? And so when he said that to me at the Q&A, that you go into it, and you work on every scene, it was a way of telling me that you really have to study your material and see what it’s telling you. And I’ve approached fiction editing in the same way.
I love editing. It’s something I’m incredibly passionate about. It’s maybe my favorite… well, one of my favorite parts of the process, and for so much of the film I’ve been working alone. So I wanted to mention how important my collaboration with editor Michael Taylor is. We’ve worked together on three films now, We both edit, and I do most of the intricate fine cutting. But I need Michael to think with, which is the most valuable thing of all. Michael is amazing at seeing the big picture, responding to the emotions and looking at the whole story. It means so much to have that one person who knows all the footage so well and who can step back and have a wider perspective, and who cares so deeply about the film. Michael is the best friend my film could have.
And so we use Fred’s answer all the time. Even when Michael and I edit fiction, we talk about that. I never make notes at the time of the shoot of like, oh, that was a good take, or that was a [bad take], because I feel like I might feel differently when I’m editing it. I think it’s really important to see what’s there. So I’ll look at everything. I have no idea what’s the best take. I don’t even know what the scene is about.
Leitner: When I first saw your film at the New York Film Festival, I was blown away. First of all, by this particular subject and by your timing, because I know when you first went over. [In October 2021, near the outset of this project, Julia and I had shared a phone conversation about shooting with iPhones.] I was aware of what was going on in Russia at that time, including the buildup along the border of Ukraine. But it was your filmmaking that, truly, I was taken by. Not because it’s a breakthrough to shoot a documentary with an iPhone. I mean, that’s a fad in younger circles. But you took maximum advantage of really small, inexpensive equipment. You were the producer, the director, the camera operator, the audio recordist—also the story editor, because of course you’re thinking story, because of course you’re a filmmaker and you’ve made films before. You brought an optimum blend of technique and directorial control.
Loktev: I would maybe argue with the last part [about being story editor], but not that I’ve made films before, but we can come back to that.
Leitner: Your work in this film reminds me of the work of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines (Demon Lover Diary, Seventeen). Are you familiar with them?
Loktev: No.
Leitner: They were two 16mm filmmakers who came out of the Richard Leacock at MIT orbit in the late 1970s. Joel just passed away a few weeks ago. They were trying to achieve the same thing you did, but back in the ‘70s. To do that, they had to use these big boxy 16-millimeter cameras, which went on their shoulders. To be more intimate with their subjects, they removed the viewfinders and replaced them with crude range finders. Essentially that’s just a rectangle you look through. The idea was that they wanted their subjects to be able to interact with them. They held the camera with one hand, they held a little microphone in the other hand, and they used a 10-millimeter wide-angle lens only, which meant that they could maintain a normal interpersonal distance with their subjects as they were filming.
I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that you accomplished all of these things with this tiny slab that was both a camera and an audio recorder and weighed nothing. This is the most direct cinema I can imagine. It seems like it’s a culmination of where vérité documentary has always wanted to go in terms of technique. And you’ve created a vérité masterpiece, I think. Nobody’s seen the second part, Part II – Exile, but already I think your film is that significant.
Loktev: Thank you so much. I think Exile will be even deeper and more emotional. Actually, we’re editing it now.
Leitner: I particularly admired the interview shots of Anya in the front seat of the car, driving. There’s nothing groundbreaking about filming someone driving in a car. But the iPhone has such a small sensor, everything tends to be in focus, even the background. And by framing her the way you did with the car’s side window behind her, we were constantly seeing Moscow flowing by, like rear-screen projection. We saw Moscow during the day. We saw Moscow at night. We saw Moscow with snow on the ground. For me, it opened up [the film]. This isn’t a film that had a lot of establishing shots of buildings or places.
Loktev: None, in fact. Not just a lot, none.
Leitner: I could see an improvement in image quality from the first chapter to the second chapter, when I think you switched to a more recent iPhone model. But it was of no story consequence. I know in the beginning you were concerned about whether the iPhone X would be adequate. It didn’t make a difference at all, really.
I thought you were really good at getting cutaways. And this gets back to thinking like an editor when you’re shooting. Of course you put those cutaways in during the editing process, and maybe you had to grab something that may have not been a conscious cutaway. But you were good at that. The scenes are really, really well cut. I admired your adherence to straight cuts — no dissolves, no fancy anything. And you weren’t afraid of jump cuts.
There was one shot that I thought was amazing. It was in the car after Lena’s girlfriend from America arrived at the airport. [Lena is Elena Kostyuchenko, “widely considered to be Russia’s best living long-form journalist, its Joan Didion,” per the film’s press notes.] You were sitting in the front seat, but you did like a perfect 270 degree pan.
Loktev: I have to give credit where credit is due. There are a couple of short scenes and I think some protest footage in the film that are actually filmed by the characters. I didn’t shoot that shot. That shot was filmed by one of the main characters, Ira Dolinina, who is also a a video journalist. Rachel arrived very quickly [at the airport] in Moscow, and I wasn’t able to make it there in time. So I had one of my characters, who is a video journalist, shoot that scene.
Leitner: That was an astonishing shot because she nailed it.
Loktev: I love the fact that the one shot you picked… I’m like, nope, I didn’t shoot that. I shot 99% of the film. But you managed to pick the one shot I didn’t shoot!
Leitner; I give you credit, though, for something more essential. When you would pan from one person to another, you were very good at stopping at the exact right framing. No fidgeting around, no looseness. It was very confident work. Reframing the camera involves timing, an aesthetic feel. And this is in all of your work. So, again, if the directing thing doesn’t work out, you could be a camera person!
There are many ways to use an iPhone. You can use the app that Apple builds into it, where you just put the iPhone in video mode and press the button. Or you can use apps like Filmic Pro, which some people do, who get more involved with the iPhone. When you did that very first shoot, how did you go about shooting it? Did you rely on the microphone that was built into the iPhone?
Loktev: So, it was made on an iPhone kind of accidentally, actually. I think I talked to you [by phone] between the first chapter and the second chapter, after my first shoot. Which, of course, I didn’t realize was going to be the first chapter, but that’s when we talked. So, initially, literally as soon as I got a visa to Russia, I jumped on a plane the next day. I thought I was going for kind of a research visit to figure things out on the ground and to talk to some camera people and get to know the characters, except for Anya, whom I knew before.
But I got there, and we were going to shoot a scene. And, in fact, I had scheduled Askold Kurov, who is a fantastic camera person, to come over. He shot Welcome to Chechnya. He’s wonderful. And he was going to come over. And then Anya, one of the main characters who I started with, said, “Listen, we have some friends coming over for dinner. We’d feel more comfortable if it was just you, because you’re our friend.” And I borrowed Askold’s camera, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it. He had some follow focus setting on it, it was a Lumix. I could not figure it out. I also had landed that just day and had borrowed it about half an hour before the dinner.
I could sense that there was so much happening around at that dinner, and this felt exciting and interesting to shoot. So I literally just put down his camera and picked up my iPhone. It was an iPhone X—I think the current iPhone model was 12 at that point—it was a fairly old model. I borrowed a Zoom microphone from Anya’s husband, and put it on the table and started shooting with the iPhone.
And I ended up shooting for that entire first shoot like that, just with my existing old iPhone, which had like 256 gigs memory, which I had to offload on my computer all the time because it was getting filled up. And using just the regular iPhone app and holding the little Zoom recorder in my hand alongside [the iPhone], using it as some equivalent of a shotgun mic. It was really improvised, I have to say. I was not planning to [do this.] That ended up being the entire first chapter of the film.
And then when I came back for the next shoot—I think I talked to you in between—I researched like how do you actually shoot on an iPhone. It felt so right, you know. When I started shooting on the phone, it just felt so right. I could have an intimacy with the characters, people were very open to me, we’re all so used to the presence of iPhones now, and it looked great. I mean, even on my crappy old iPhone, it looked pretty great. And then I got, I think at that point it was an iPhone 13 eventually, or 14.
I’ve gotten mixed up in the iPhone models, you know, because I kept upgrading the iPhones as they released new ones. For the next shoot, I got an upgraded iPhone. I got a 58mm Moment lens that I would attach to it, and I got other microphones. So starting with Chapter 2, I would start putting lavs [lavalier mics] on people. I had a couple of Zoom recorders that I would place around.
But I was shooting alone, without a crew. So you walk in and you have that really uncomfortable… I actually really hate that moment when you have to put lavs on people because it interrupts reality. Because usually I come in and I’m shooting, and then you have to take that minute of, like, “Can you stick this little microphone on you? Can I hide this mic on you?” And now we keep going. So, there’s this brief interruption of reality. I used Zoom F2 recorders. It’s just a tiny little thing that a person can wear on them. You have a lav going into it. They record onto a little SD card that’s recording for hours. I also had a little, tiny little Shure shotgun mic, just attached to the phone. I didn’t use a cage. Because I thought, that’s when it gets kind of too big. People keep asking me how I held it, what I use to stabilize the camera. My elbows and my stomach, that’s what I use.
Leitner: The human Steadicam.
Loktev: Yeah, exactly. You put your hands up, you stick your elbows in your gut. And you do your best. That’s how I shot the rest of the film: little mics, just the iPhone, a 58 millimeter Moment lens, most of the time.
Leitner: That’s interesting. Did that 58mm Moment lens [a 2x tele-converter] achieve more of a close-up? Why did you favor an attached lens over the set of built-in lenses?
Loktev: Well, I’m not the most techie person in general. That one lens has the best kind of response to light. You don’t want to use the built-in zoom in the iPhone, because it’s just not as good in low light. And yeah, it allows me to be a little bit further from the characters, because I film people. I’m interested in humans. I’m interested in their faces. I film people I fall in love with as characters. And so, I want to see the emotions on their face.
One of the things with the iPhone is that you have to be really close up to people if you’re filming them in close-up. Even with the 58 millimeter lens, I was still only four or five feet away usually. Which is interesting. It influences your relationship with the characters. So often people film documentaries with a longer lens, and they’re physically far from the characters, filming from across the room. I think this influences how you feel the film, when you create that artificial closeness through a long lens.
The 58mm Moment lens pretty much mimics what your eye sees. You end up really close physically to the characters. They get used to your body being there, even though I’m not really in the film. Every once in a while you hear my voice a tiny bit. But the characters sometimes speak to me directly. My presence is there. And I think it really has an effect on how you feel the film, the proximity that you have with the characters when you film that physically close. In some situations, of course, like in cars, I had to be extremely close. There’s a scene with three girls in the back of a car, and they’re getting warmed up while we’re waiting for someone to be released from a police station. There’s three of them in close-up. And people are asking me, where were you? I was sitting on their feet on the floor. Sometimes on their lap.
Leitner: Yeah, I wondered the same thing about that scene. Because at one point, you pan from them to the exterior of the jail. And it’s a seamless pan. It’s as if you’ve got the car door open already. I don’t know how you did it, but it’s very well done.
Loktev: Thank you. Well, that’s was one thing I was going to say, when you brought up the story editor. I’m not really sure what a story editor does. I think of that as someone who plans things in advance, and I’m not someone who planned things in advance. This is a film that was made entirely by instinct, by listening. It’s just, things are happening in front of you. You don’t know what’s going to happen. And you respond the best way you can. Sometimes you manage to respond well. Sometimes you respond not so well with the camera. You’re seeing the edited parts. But you just do your best. I mean, you really have to just shut up and really listen. Because you don’t know when somebody’s going to say something interesting. You’re trying to pan to the right moment and catch the reaction and pan back. But you’re just really listening and going with gut instinct.
There’s really no planning at all. I mean, I really didn’t know what this film was going to be. I thought it was going to be a feature-length film about journalists being named “foreign agents” in Russia. And then history happened. And I just kept filming and kept going on, I think, pure instinct. Just trying to follow the story, trying to follow the characters, and trying to listen, which I think is the most important thing.
Leitner: Well, I think you have an inner dramaturge, because your instincts are so on target. And I realize we’re looking at the edited version. But so many times when you would follow the beat of the moment with the camera, you were right on. I really enjoyed watching your camera work.
Loktev: I have to say, it was thrilling for me. It was thrilling for me to do. I know this is kind of a strange thing to say, because it’s a very dark subject matter. But I found the making of the film thrilling. My fiction work has been extremely controlled. Well, with the exception, I was going to say, of the Times Square parts of Day Night, Day Night. I work in a really choreographed way where every shot is really precise. Everything is planned. And this was throwing everything out the window.
This was just, you show up, you start filming, you see what happens. You do your best to keep up. You hope the battery doesn’t run out. You’re just trying to stay on top of it, and listen, and try to follow with your eye, with your ear, and see what happens. And because I make fiction and documentaries, my instinct is very much about character, about faces, about emotions, much more so than just information, let’s say. I don’t actually like what you said about cutaways.
I’m not very good at planning. I do try to shoot some cutaways, for example, when I know I’m not going to use a part of a conversation that’s happening, I try to shoot some of the other people around, hoping, just really hoping one of those little cutaways will work later on when you need to bridge a cut. But really, I’m not cutting in my head. It’s almost too much work at that point. You’re in this highly, highly attuned adrenaline state where you’re just trying to listen to what’s happening and follow and respond in the best way you can. So, planning doesn’t even really enter the picture at that point. (Laughs.)
Leitner: One thing that simplified your production, I’m guessing, is that you were never wearing headphones.
Loktev: Never.
Leitner: You had the audio on auto-level control and trusted that that would be good enough.
Loktev: Yes, that’s true. I never had headphones, but I believe in the belt and suspenders method of audio recording. I always had multiple mics, because one mic is going to run out of batteries. At one point, as TV Rain was getting shut down on the last night that everyone was in Russia, I think two of my lavs crapped out. You know, something is always going to crap out. And when you’re shooting alone, you don’t have somebody monitoring anything. You don’t have somebody checking things. So, you just have to try to get as many mics on as possible and pray that a few of them will give you a good recording, which they did.
Leitner: I never heard any clothing rustle from any of your lavs, and I never saw any mics. So you did a very good job.
Loktev: Thank you. You do see sometimes the Zoom recorder on the table and the stereo. And I have a four channel recorder. Every once in a while, you’d see it in the shot, but I didn’t care. The lavs you didn’t see. I use, what are they called, Bubblebee. They’re little stick-on rubber things, like a little cocoon for the lav, and you stick it onto the person.
Leitner: Fred, who spent most of his filmmaking career as a sound recordist while he was directing, commented at the end that the sound was excellent. Really excellent. He was really impressed by it.
Loktev: I came to film through sound. I did radio and kind of music DJing and audio art before. So I think in sound.
Leitner: Now we know!
Loktev: Now we know, exactly. But for me, where sound plays really a big role is in editing. I cut on sound very often. We never, for example, use audio dissolves unless you’re like trying to bridge car engine noise and smooth that out. Between scenes, I never use dissolves. Maybe a one-frame dissolve to get rid of a click and that’s it. I like to feel the cut. So I will often cut on a sharp, unpleasant sound if I can find one. I listen to the footage and I let the sounds in the footage in some ways tell me where to cut. And I think that’s what people notice. Usually they don’t know exactly, because people comment on the sound in my films often. But in this case, I think what they’re noticing is how it’s cut with sound. Really, we didn’t add things in the post. It’s really just the actual sound that I gathered, you know. Cleaned up refrigerator hum and things like this. But it’s the [actual] sound of the scenes.
Leitner: Did you add the sound of that cat meowing crossing the street?
Loktev: (Laughs.) Busted! I think we literally added one car pulling away and one cat. I was just joking the other day that if we had an M&E track, it would involve one cat and one car pulling away. That’s very funny that you picked the one thing… that’s really good!
Leitner: I’ve been a musician and I’ve recorded audio my whole life. These days, when I shoot alone, one-man band style, I always record at least four tracks. I think in terms of sound as much as I think in terms of picture. That’s why I noticed it. There was no way you could have recorded that cat.
When you were first shooting that very first scene, did you set the frame rate on the iPhone? Or did you just use the frame rate that automatically kicked in? Do you know what I’m getting at?
Loktev: Sensitive subject. Yeah, the film is a bit mixed in frame rates. I think my camera was set on 29.97 or something. And then I switched it to 24. Sometimes because of strobing, I would have to switch to 25. [Note: Russia’s AC electrical power is 50Hz. A frame rate of 25 syncs with lights flickering at this line frequency, which avoids strobing.] And people told me this would be kind of a big deal. But you know what? It really wasn’t a big deal in the end.
Leitner: It’s not noticeable in the least.
Loktev: I remember having a conversation with a post supervisor who was telling me all these things about like, oh, you have to watch out for these mixed frame rates. And obviously, after that, I did try to be consistent unless I was getting flicker. But it really was not that big a deal.
Leitner: So at the outset, you used the iPhone’s built-in app [to record video]. But did you end up switching?
Loktev: I switched [starting] from Chapter 2. I switched to Filmic Pro. But that was also a bit of a learn. Again, I was just learning to shoot this [film], as I was shooting. When I first got [Filmic Pro], I tried a couple of things. I tried shooting in ProRes. Like, good lord, I’m going to spend all night downloading things from my iPhone to my computer. [Note: ProRes files are huge.] I don’t have that kind of time because every day I’m shooting, and I’m shooting all day. I’m coming back [at the end of the day], and I’m organizing the footage. So I switched to H.264, is that what it is? — or H.265, now on the phone. Again, the technology has evolved during the three years I’ve been shooting.
Also, when I started out on the Filmic Pro, I started out trying to futz with the exposure, trying to futz with… and I was like, you can’t. You don’t have time to do that when you’re shooting vérité. It’s really catch as catch can. [Attempting to use manual controls] was actually making things much worse. Some of our most challenging color correction had to do with when I had tried to set things manually, and then it wasn’t shifting as I was moving from room to room. So then I just put [Filmic Pro] on auto white balance. And I put it on auto exposure and auto focus. But I did use the reticles, which are the little circle and the square that tells you where to point the focus and where to point the exposure. That’s the great advantage of Filmic Pro over the Apple built-in app, where there’s only one little square that you move that marries the exposure and the focus, which is really hard to set. With Filmic Pro, you can move just the exposure, just a little. I do it instinctively. I was constantly just moving those as I was shooting. So [Filmic Pro] was on auto, but I would take the exposure from this part of the frame, take the focus for this part of the frame. Does that make sense?
Leitner: I saw you controlling the focus in some shots, where somebody might be in the foreground, and you threw the focus to that person. So I knew you were doing some focus control.
Loktev: Exactly. And that’s literally by just moving the little target for the focus. I want to focus on this person. I want to focus on that person. And or I want to put the exposure target here or the exposure target there. And that was it. Because, again, things are happening in front of you and they’re unpredictable and they’re happening fast. You just have to be able to focus on listening and finding a shot to the best of your abilities.
Leitner: The iPhone, if I could call it the camera, is so sophisticated now, it does a reasonably good job of tracking color balance. It’s not like in the old days of camcorders when it would be really embarrassing if auto color balance was obvious.
Loktev: No, the color balance in Filmic Pro was great. Like I said, I completely screwed myself up by trying to lock the color, the white balance, a few times. I did it on one evening shoot. And I said, oh, God, that looks awful. Never again. I think the thing that I learned about this is that all those things don’t really matter that much. I mean, yes, it matters absolutely to make sure you have mics on people and you’re getting good sound. But a lot of the kind of technical details that people obsess over don’t really matter if you’re shooting something that is interesting. It’s what’s in the frame and the story you’re telling, and how you’re telling it, that matters. I mean, it was very liberating for me to make this film because it really helped me let go of a lot of things that I thought were important. And that was absolutely thrilling.
Leitner: You also had to be your own digital imaging technician. You had to do the transfers to hard drives, and you had to make backups.
Loktev: Absolutely. Every night I transferred all my footage, and I organized two to six microphones in folders for every shoot, every night. And I made a backup. Our assistant editor told me that my footage came to him more organized than it comes from people who have a specialized crew member for this. I always say that you need to have a lot of order so that then you can work with chaos. Shooting vérité is chaos, and you’re responding to chaos. So you have to create a little bit of order, in order for that chaos to be fruitful and exciting and produce a good result. So I organize all my footage every single night.
Leitner: Did you spot check from time to time, to sample what you were getting?
Loktev: I probably should have done that more often than I did. I would have discovered my mics had crapped out. But no, I was literally shooting every day, especially during the kind of the crisis moments. I was shooting every day from morning to night. So I didn’t. I’m not saying I recommend not spot checking. But I did not spot check as often as I should have, and, well, there’s only so many hours in a day.
Leitner: Of course, you need to eat and sleep as well. But when I was watching the film with Fred, one of Fred’s questions to me was, “How did she reload?” And I said, well, Fred, she didn’t. She could record hours on one iPhone. And Fred said, well, she must have had several iPhones for when she ran out of footage.
Loktev: I did have a second iPhone, largely because actually having [the iPhone’s] phone on, in any capacity, I found sometimes created sound interference. So my regular phone I used for calling and messaging. It was mostly battery [that ran out], actually, not [storage]. I had the one-terabyte phone. It didn’t run out of space. Except for—there’s the caveat!—when I accidentally shot the first chapter with my iPhone X, which had 256 gigs of memory, which I literally had to offload. It was like reloading a camera. It was insane. But that’s because I wasn’t planning to shoot with it. So there I was literally walking around, plugging it in Anya’s car, offloading it onto my laptop every half an hour like an insane person. It felt like changing film. But that is not what the technology is capable of today. That’s what happens when you have an old iPhone and you start shooting a movie.
Leitner: What I liked about Fred’s notion is, what if you were in a dangerous situation where maybe your iPhone could be seized? It occurred to me that he was right, that it might make sense to have a backup iPhone.
Loktev: Unfortunately, they were both usually on my body, so they would have probably seized both. But I was offloading my footage onto two drives. I was shooting in a situation where there was a high possibility that I’d be searched. So I was taking drives over to people’s houses, hiding them so we’d have a backup drive if I lost the footage. I was especially concerned about preserving the footage during the first week of the full-scale war in Russia, when the U.S. Embassy was telling all Americans to leave, when all my characters one-by-one were leaving the country. People always ask, was I afraid for my safety? I think I became kind of monomaniacal at that point. All I was thinking about was doing my best to shoot what I could and preserving the footage. As people I knew were leaving the country during that first week of the full-scale war, I kept going and buying drives and making backups and sending out drives with people, so at least most of the footage would make it out. When I left, I didn’t want to take it all out together, in one go. So I had multiple copies going out of the country. I figured if one failed, another would make it.
Leitner: Did you buy drives in Moscow?
Loktev: I had drives to start with. And then during the first week of the full-scale war, I was going around Moscow buying any drives I could. As you know, Russia was getting cut off from the SWIFT banking system, from international trade, and drives were flying off the shelves. So I was basically just going around to various electronic stores, which were getting emptied out, and trying to scoop up whatever drives I could find that I could send out with people.
Leitner: In the scene in which journalists Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya are fleeing Moscow at night in a car, you were with them in the car filming — but you must have gotten out of the car at some point, because that same night you’re at TV Rain when the rumor hits that Special Forces are on their way to shut down the studio, and suddenly, everybody is scrambling and the camera goes black. Were you in two places at once?
Loktev: Yes, they happened the same night. For people who haven’t seen Part I, it culminates with the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And during that week, journalism became impossible in Russia, as just calling it a war became a criminal act. And so all the characters, one-by-one, make a decision that they can do more good as journalists outside the country, continuing to report on this war, than they can sitting in a jail cell, where they won’t be able to be journalists. And one-by-one, during the first week of the full-scale war, they leave the country. And so I was filming them all, as they were leaving. And two of these characters, Irina and Alesya, were driving. It’s a 15-hour drive, I think, and they were going to Latvia, then to Prague. But I got in the car with them leaving Moscow. As we’re driving away from Moscow, I figured I’d jump out of the car an hour or two later and figure out a way back. But as we’re leaving, they look at their phone and they say, “Oh, they just shut down TV Rain!”, the last independent TV channel in Russia. So I’m like, I think I should go to that shoot instead! We’re on the highway, and I just say, OK, pull over by the next bridge crossing, where I can get to the other side. We pulled over, and I caught an Uber to the TV Rain station.
Leitner: That’s the scenario I had in my head.
Loktev: It’s literally what happened. And by the next morning, all the characters had left the country, because that night everyone was making the decision, “Do we come to work tomorrow? No, we go to the airport.” And so many of the characters left the country with just four hours notice, a carry-on suitcase, really quickly. Just let’s get the only ticket you can buy and get out of the country.
And I left a day later. I stayed just to upload the footage again. I left after all my characters left the country. I spent one day making sure I got the footage out, uploaded to Google Drive so it would somehow be out. And then I left the next day, and I joined them in Istanbul, which was one of the only places that you could still buy a plane ticket to from Russia at that time.
And I continued to film them, from their first days of exile, when they have no idea what the rest of their lives will look like, have no idea what country they’re going to next. They’ve just left Russia, their media don’t exist. They’re trying to figure out, “How can we be journalists now, where this is the biggest story of our lives? This Russia is invading Ukraine.” Obviously, they’re all against the war. And meanwhile, they’re just in a hostel in Istanbul with their bank cards, which don’t work. Nothing works. They have no media, and they’re trying to figure out how to keep going. So that’s the beginning of Part II – Exile. I kept following them over the next three years.
Leitner: I think you’ve shown what can be done by one person in extraordinary circumstances with the most minimal possible camera rig one could imagine. And I think that in the years to come, there’ll be some student sitting in an audience that will raise their hand, some very shy student, and ask you if you need an intern.
Loktev: I don’t teach. But I think if I taught, the thing that I would keep repeating to people is to approach things like you don’t know, rather than approach things like you do know. I remember when I first met the characters for the first time, we had a Zoom meeting with all of them. And I said, I have no idea what this film is going to be. If I knew what it’s going to be, I wouldn’t want to make it. Also, to constantly approach the characters with curiosity, to constantly approach the footage with curiosity… that’s really the best thing that I think I can impart.
Leitner: It’s interesting you use the word curiosity, because when I think of Fred Wiseman, I think of curiosity. He has endless curiosity. He doesn’t predetermine or pre-think anything. He doesn’t simply go with the flow either. He has a discerning intellect. And he thinks thematically. He spends a lot of time reading poetry and books. I mean, his intellect is behind everything. It’s the wind that fills his sail. You watch his films and you see it.
And as you can appreciate, his favorite part of filmmaking is the editing. Because that’s when he takes these materials that he’s gathered and tries to construct something meaningful to him. He’s always the first audience. He used to do a film a year. He has a cabin up near Belfast, Maine, which he basically designed. It’s sort of a log cabin, but with a two-story atrium when you walk in. The four walls are glazed so that you can see the outdoors. It’s almost like the outdoors can come indoors. And he has a basement. In the basement, the floor of which is covered in warm brick, he used to have anywhere from one to three Steenbecks [16mm flatbed editing machines]. And what he would do is, he would shoot in the spring, let’s say, then spend the entire summer editing in the basement, while he was essentially vacationing in Maine. His greatest enjoyment was to sit down there by himself, lost in his own thoughts, eating sardines and crackers and editing all summer long. I said to him, “You’ve had a great life!”
Loktev: I’m editing a 10-hour film now. It feels like I don’t even remember what life was like before editing. All day, because that’s all I do, I sit there, but that’s my happy place, lost in the footage and just studying it, distilling it and then distilling it more. There’s a joy to it, because you really are studying the footage, trying to excavate it, find pieces, see how it fits together. When you’re starting a scene, you’re not looking for something, you’re trying to really just see and see and see and see and learn. And so absolutely, that is a good life. Although I love shooting too. If you’re shooting with people you enjoy being with, even in the toughest moments, there’s a pleasure to it
Getting people to see this thing is going to be, oh my god, a struggle. You tell people it’s a 5 1/2 hour movie about journalists in Russia, and they’re like waaaah… and then they see it and they’re like, whoa.
Leitner: When do you anticipate the second half will be finished?
Loktev: I’m now editing the third of the five chapters and kind of zeroing in on it, with two left. I think we’ll be done by the end of the fall, but it can only go so fast. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage. The interesting thing is, it’s not that I have a ton of scenes that I don’t end up using. But something that ends up being a five minute scene might have six hours of footage. So it takes some time.
Leitner: Everything you cook on the stove takes a certain amount of time. You can’t rush it. It just takes the time it takes.
Loktev: It takes the time it takes, exactly. I’ll probably do a little bit more shooting, because I want to leave off with the characters as close to when we put out Part II as possible. Obviously, this story just keeps unfolding in unexpected ways. One of the things that people used to ask me, how do I think Part II will end? And I didn’t really know, because the war seems to be kind of going on and on and on. Putin’s clearly not going anywhere, and there is a kind of stasis. I think exile in some ways is about things being suspended and indefinite. It’s a very different sense of time. But one of the things I didn’t expect is the convergence between the U.S. and Russia. I didn’t have the imagination.
Leitner: Nor did I. The world is upside down.
This conversation has been edited for length and concision.
The U.S. Theatrical Premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow is Friday, August 15, at New York’s The Film Forum, for a one-week run. The film will be shown in two sections – Crackdown: Chapters 1-3 (213 min. with a 15-min. intermission) and First Week of War: Chapters 4-5 (125 min.). Each section is a separate admission.
For a deeper dive into the themes and main characters, the Director’s Notes are here.
