Behind the Scenes of '99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film'

Via Occupy Chicago.

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/behind-the-scenes-of-99-percent-the-occupy-wall-street-collaborative-film-20130126

Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites, the team behind 99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, initially attempted to adopt a filmmaking model as decentralized as the Occupy movement itself. However, the pair soon discovered that the consensus decision process is as complicated for directing films as it is for orienting political movements.

"It just didn't work. We couldn't get anything done," Ewell tells Rolling Stone. "At least with the Occupiers, [they] were in one physical space together. We didn't even have that; we had an email list with hundreds of emails."

99 Percent, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, began to form after Ewell and Aites grew interested in the movement after the October arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. "I was watching the live stream when they started to cattle them and started arresting them. I turned on the TV, and there was nothing," recalls Ewell. "There are like a thousand people being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City in broad daylight and that's not news."

So the filmmakers, who previously made Until the Light Takes Us – a 2009 documentary on black metal – went to lower Manhattan and began shooting. 

"We had three rules when we started the film," Ewell says. "The first rule was that anybody was welcome and that meant any perspective, any skill level, any format. But we couldn't get anything done."

(More at the link.)