Adrian McElwee, son of the filmmaker Ross McElwee, was such an interesting child, full of precocious wisdom. For instance, when his father asked young Adrian during a seaside trip, “Why do you think you like fishing so much?” the boy spontaneously replied, “I don’t know. I just love the deep surprise of the ocean.”
The elder McElwee would include his son in many of his films and later, when Adrian entered adulthood, they worked together on documentaries. But Adrian’s fate was not to be a happy one. The boy who displayed such joy and promise as a child experienced periodic depression as an adult and slipped into drug addiction.
In McElwee’s documentary Remake, which just aired on the PBS series POV, he explores his relationship with Adrian and his son’s struggles after he came of age, which culminated with Adrian’s untimely death at the age of 27. The film has won awards around the world including the Impact Golden Globes Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival, the ReFrame Award for Creative Use of Archive at IDFA in Amsterdam, and the True Vision Award at True/False in Columbia, MO.
McElwee joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss the film and what he learned about himself during the making of Remake. No film could be more heartbreaking, yet there are touches of humor throughout. The director tells us about striking that delicate balance and whether he sees this as his final film.
Music Box Films acquired Remake and the company also released a restored version of McElwee’s 1985 documentary Sherman’s March, the film that launched his career and inaugured a new style of documentary filmmaking where the director – through on camera commentary and voice-over – guides the viewer through the subject matter. The influence of that style can be seen in many successive films including You Can See Everything, which just premiered at Telluride, and The Oldest Person in the World, directed by Sam Green. On the pod, McElwee talks about the making of Sherman’s March, which becomes a significant storyline in Remake.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
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