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At the time of writing, David Brisbin’slatest project, The Exorcism of EmilyRose, was already generating buzzon the online discussion boards andmovie sites. Anticipated as a genuinelyintelligent horror film, it is expected toboost the career of its director, ScottDerrickson, and showcase standout per-formances from its leads, Laura Linneyand Tom Wilkinson.

Brisbin’s work as the productiondesigner will play a pivotal role in the

audience’s perception of the film, but he will receive little or no credit for its criticalor commercial success. In fact, most people who see it won’t know that he exists.

Brisbin is responsible for designing some of the most interesting and original– if not the most commercially successful – movies of the last 20 years. His creditsinclude Drugstore Cowboy, the film that marked Matt Dillon as the archetype ofalternative cool, and My Own Private Idaho, a picture almost as famous for itsstrikingly beautiful design as it is for River Phoenix’s best performance. Even theless critically acclaimed films on his Internet Movie Database listing – the Hughesbrothers’ Dead Presidents and Jane Campion’s In the Cut, to name two – have receivedsignificant kudos for the way they look.

Being a production designer requires a combination of artistic vision and near-fanatical attention to detail. But Brisbin had less lofty reasons for his career

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TEXT BY DANIEL GIBBONS; IMAGES BY DAVID BRISBIN

Below theLine

12ORANGE LIFE: ISSUE THREE

14ORANGE LIFE: ISSUE THREE

choice of first art direction and subsequently production design: “I needed a jobafter film school and there were few jobs to be had in writing or direction.”

Production designers also require a certain lack of ego. Ask average moviegoerswhat a production designer does, and few will be able to answer. They are even lesslikely to know that the production designer typically manages the most people andthe largest budget of any other individual on set.

Brisbin speaks often of the “below- the-line community,” the dozens, sometimeshundreds, of names in the credits most of us don’t bother to read as the lightscome on and we leave the theatre. Unlike the stars, the majority of these people don’texperience vast commercial success and celebrity. Their lives may be less mundaneby virtue of their association with Hollywood, but mostly they are ordinary peoplewith kids, mortgages and no healthcare benefits or job security. These people arealmost entirely separated from the real engine that drives mainstream cinema:the deal-making that, as in any other industry, seeks the highest returns from itsinvestments. That the film industry’s product is always at some level creative andmost of the below-the-line community signed up for this reason alone makes theprocess that much more poignant.

A career that is both very challenging and not publicly rewarding is fitting forBrisbin, and goes some way in explaining his dedication to another project, one inwhich he has made considerable personal and financial investment without theexpectation of commercial success or celebrity.

Brisbin has recently completed his first full-length film, a documentary featureabout Cambodia. In it, the motif of the hat is used to trace the history of a countryknown to outsiders only in fragments (the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge, mostlikely learned through a couple viewings of Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields, forexample). The hat is significant for Brisbin because “it carries such political andcultural baggage, and it’s attached to the face” – the ideal device through which toexplore stories about history and culture. The film is called, appropriately enough,Nice Hat: Five Enigmas in the Life of Cambodia, and Brisbin is its writer, directorand narrator.

Nice Hat sounds impossibly obscure at first, but that’s part of the point:through this film, and a planned series of others, Brisbin hopes to challenge ourcollective ignorance about the part of the world that doesn’t fit into the five-secondsound bites of modern news media.

But it’s not obscurity for its own sake. Rather, in the case of Cambodia, thereis simply so much to be learned from times before, during and after the Khmer

Rouge, about colonialism and Westernforeign policy in the post-colonialworld, about the lives of real people,rather than the caricatures of povertyor exoticism we occasionally see on TV.As Brisbin says, in this age of global-ization “nobody wants to get to knowthe neighbours.”

Brisbin’s first experiences ofCambodia were as a reporter visitingrefugee camps on the border of Thailandin the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge’sreign of terror. More recently, he designedMatt Dillon’s directorial debut, City ofGhosts, which was filmed on location inCambodia and whose backdrop touchedon many of the themes that are front andcentre in Nice Hat. It was after City ofGhosts that Brisbin decided he simplyhad to make his film, which is now inpost-production.

Watching the film, the lastingimpression is one of a commitment totelling a story because it needed to betold, rather than because it is one thatis particularly sellable. From the 12th-century temples of Angkor Wat to thekilling fields and their aftermath, tomodern-day hat makers in Phnom Penhsurviving amid fierce competition fromChinese industry, Brisbin’s narrativeis resolutely about the extent to whichCambodia today originates from a vitaland fascinating history, and that thishistory requires much more thansuperficial treatment. That the film is

THERE IS A PERCEPTION OUT THEREOF DISASTER COUNTRIES. IT IS DAN-GEROUS, BECAUSE IT IS A DEPERSONAL-IZATION THAT PUTS POPULATIONS ATRISK. NO COUNTRY HAS BEEN RELE-GATED MORE SEVERELY TO THIS LISTTHAN CAMBODIA.

eminently watchable and engaging is a tribute to Brisbin’s skill at telling acomplex story at least as much as it isto the charisma of 16-year-old Ven Vern(who also likes to call himself JamesBond), the on-screen narrator for thefilm’s opening chapters.

The highlights of Brisbin’s life andcareer at times read themselves like amovie script, some kind of boy’s ownadventure. Life as a child in Derry,Northern Ireland, film school at theCalifornia Institute for the Arts, work asa reporter covering the collapse of theMarcos regime in the Philippines. He hasalso worked in apartheid-bound SouthAfrica, poverty-stricken Haiti and milita-rized Guatemala. All these experienceshave contributed to his sense not merelyof the world’s persistent injustices, butalso the humanity that exists amongthose living in political and economicconditions unknown to most of us in thecomfortable West.

As Brisbin puts it: “There is a per-ception out there of disaster countries.It is dangerous, because it is a deperson-alization that puts populations at risk.No country has been relegated moreseverely to this list than Cambodia. Andnow, at the moment when it is in regen-eration mode, is a time to reconsider thebefore, during and after.”

Another topic that comes up timeand time again in conversation withBrisbin is the terrifying, overwhelming

odds that face any filmmaker lookingto raise money and find distribution. Ifyou don’t have a friend who’s making hisown film or writing a screenplay, you’realmost certain to have a friend whoknows someone who is. It’s two degreesof separation, not six.

Documentary filmmakers, recog-nizing how important the festival circuitis to the success of their films, mightinitially be reassured to discover thatin 2004’s Sundance Film Festival, arecord 46 of the 137 full-length featuresscreened were documentaries. Unfor-tunately, those 46 films were selectedfrom 2023 entries. In the Documentarycategory, just 16 were chosen from 624entries. Even a screening at Sundancedoesn’t guarantee mainstream distribu-tion. At best, perhaps 10 of the successfulentries will make it to theatres, few ifany of them documentaries.

Documentaries, one might thinkfrom the box office success of Super SizeMe, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Yes Men andcountless others, are enjoying a renais-sance. Films that would once have beenconfined to art house cinemas are show-ing up at suburban multiplexes. Thereality is in some respects nothing morethan an extension of the reality TVphenomenon. The documentaries we see

in theatres are not so much stories asthey are series after series of shockingand provocative vignettes in which thepersona of the filmmaker dominates theproceedings. Some make serious andinteresting points, and many avoid easysensationalism, but they are a very dif-ferent product from the films Brisbin isinterested in making. They are by theirvery nature populist, fleeting and con-sumable; most of all, they are “real”stories used to support the opinions oftheir creators, rather than reveal widertruths about the world in which we live.

In facing these odds while remain-ing committed to making a film thatseeks to educate its audience, Brisbin iscandid about his lack of marketingsavvy. His comment about the conven-tional process of making a film – pitchingan idea and placing it into “develop-ment” – is particularly revealing in itsirony: “Creativity dies the day develop-ment begins.”

The odds that Nice Hat will be seenby millions in movie theatres around theglobe are slim to say the least. At the sametime, there’s no doubting Brisbin’s beliefthat it will in the end be enough to havedone a very good job of telling an impor-tant story. If his film succeeds for thesereasons, it should give hope to us all._OL

FILMS THAT WOULD ONCE HAVE BEENCONFINED TO ART HOUSE CINEMAS ARESHOWING UP AT SUBURBAN MULTIPLEXES.