As someone deeply interested in the concept of the oldest person in the world, it seems apt that filmmaker Sam Green embarked on his upcoming documentary without knowing when the project would end. Mere hours after the film moved its very first audience, The Daily Californian stole Green away from the hectic flurry of a Sundance premiere — over the necessitated convenience of a phone call — to chat about “The Oldest Person in the World.”
See, “The Oldest Person in the World” follows Green traveling the globe to meet the oldest person in the world every time the exclusive title is redistributed. This narrative contains some built-in prerequisites, most notably, time.
“At first, I said, ‘I’m just gonna do this forever and someday, it’ll be a movie, but I didn’t have any concrete plans,” Green said, regarding his unconventional timeline. This intrapersonal dialogue took place in 2015, shortly before the 116th birthday party of Susannah Mushatt Jones — day one of Green’s decade-long shooting process, and the film’s first subject. “At some point, the producer I work with, Josh Penn, said, ‘Why don’t we do a shoot on the 10-year anniversary and make that Episode 1, and I thought that was pretty great — 10 years is a good amount of time.”
The fact that Green had to be prompted to stake a checkpoint at the decade point illuminates just how earnest his curiosity in the concept of the oldest person in the world truly is. “Why do some people live a long time, and other people don’t? What is the role of fate in our lives?”
He continued, “Time is so strange — time goes fast and time goes slow. A lifetime can seem like a long time. A lifetime can seem like a short time. My feeling is that (the concept of) the oldest person in the world is a symbol of all that.”
Though these are the existential questions Green poses as his theses, he surely knows empirical answers will likely never be uprooted. They are the queries that he initially set out to answer some 11 years ago — after the passing of his father — even if he hadn’t put words to them at the time. “In the beginning, when somebody asks, ‘Why are you doing this?’ you really don’t have any answer. You’re held to things in an unarticulated way, or for reasons you don’t understand. “In some ways,” he emphasized, “I’ve come to think that you make a film to understand what it was all about in the first place.”
“It,” in Green’s case, is the compulsion he felt after his father’s passing to learn about Susannah Mushatt Jones, the oldest person in the world between June 17, 2015, and May 12, 2016. Attending her 116th birthday party — where Jones was officially declared the oldest person in the world — he wound up more attentive to the attendees than Jones herself.
Taking place at the Vandalia Senior Center in New York, what was supposed to be a bash felt more like a press event swarming with reporters. Partygoers were electric, donning jovial expressions and ignoring the elephant in the room: Jones hunched over in her chair, snoozing through nearly the entire affair.
Their overcompensation, Green explains, could elude some deeper discomfort with the idea of being the oldest person in the world.
“People are so weirded out and interested and slightly horrified by the oldest person in the world,” Green said. “The fact that nobody’s alive from the day you were born. There’s nobody on Earth who was around when you were born.”
Those who reach this phenomenal milestone inherently carry existentialism with them. Because of this, spectators unsure of their own stance on life and death are unsure how to react — almost as if these record holders have graduated from humanity and ascended to some higher being. Green’s exploration of these ontological questions for himself, in turn, sheds much-needed light on a topic that is widely considered yet rarely discussed.
Leaping back to 2015, Green discussed the accidental way his passion for filmmaking arose.
“I went to UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism,” he said, knowingly. “I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. And a friend of mine — this is embarrassing to admit — said, ‘Hey, I hear the documentary class is really easy; you wanna take it with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’”
Documentarian Marlon Riggs was the professor for Film 125: Documentary Forms at the time (though it likely went by a different name), and Green reported that the class changed his life, as he began filmmaking immediately after. “Sometimes, people ask me if I wish I were still doing journalism, and I always kind of bridle because I am doing journalism; I’m using all the things I learned (in journalism school), and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Before turning back to his brilliant premiere, he spoke earnestly about how to determine what a documentary should look like when production has not even wrapped.
“Oh, you don’t. You definitely don’t,” he instinctively said, before expanding, “Actually, (here’s) what it is: You have one idea, and the world says something else. Making a film is a dialogue between those two ideas, right? (You say,) ‘Here’s my idea for the film,’ and then the material says, ‘No, we should be this.’ And you go back and forth.”
On the phone, Green passionately illustrated this “back and forth” dialogue by impersonating the two voices. Though it was incredibly admirable, the quote above has been simplified for clarity.
He concluded by emphasizing this dialogue, calling it one of the things he loves most about documentaries. “It’s much more interesting than anything I could think of. The world is way more interesting than my imagination,” Green said.