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 \u2014 over the necessitated convenience of a phone call \u2014 to chat about \u201cThe Oldest Person in the World.\u201d<\/p>\n
See, \u201cThe Oldest Person in the World\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, I said, \u2018I\u2019m just gonna do this forever and someday, it\u2019ll be a movie, but I didn\u2019t have any concrete plans,\u201d Green said, regarding his unconventional timeline. This intrapersonal dialogue took place in 2015, shortly before the 116th birthday party of Susannah Mushatt Jones \u2014 day one of Green\u2019s decade-long shooting process, and the film\u2019s first subject. \u201cAt some point, the producer I work with, Josh Penn, said, \u2018Why don\u2019t we do a shoot on the 10-year anniversary and make that Episode 1, and I thought that was pretty great \u2014 10 years is a good amount of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWhy do some people live a long time, and other people don\u2019t? What is the role of fate in our lives?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He continued, \u201cTime is so strange \u2014 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 after the passing of his father \u2014 even if he hadn\u2019t put words to them at the time. \u201cIn the beginning, when somebody asks, \u2018Why are you doing this?\u2019 you really don\u2019t have any answer. You\u2019re held to things in an unarticulated way, or for reasons you don\u2019t understand. \u201cIn some ways,\u201d he emphasized, \u201cI\u2019ve come to think that you make a film to understand what it was all about in the first place.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt,\u201d in Green\u2019s case, is the compulsion he felt after his father\u2019s 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 \u2014 where Jones was officially declared the oldest person in the world \u2014 he wound up more attentive to the attendees than Jones herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their overcompensation, Green explains, could elude some deeper discomfort with the idea of being the oldest person in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are so weirded out and interested and slightly horrified by the oldest person in the world,\u201d Green said. \u201cThe fact that nobody\u2019s alive from the day you were born. There\u2019s nobody on Earth who was around when you were born.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 almost as if these record holders have graduated from humanity and ascended to some higher being. Green\u2019s exploration of these ontological questions for himself, in turn, sheds much-needed light on a topic that is widely considered yet rarely discussed.<\/p>\n
Leaping back to 2015, Green discussed the accidental way his passion for filmmaking arose.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism,\u201d he said, knowingly. \u201cI wanted to be a newspaper reporter. And a friend of mine \u2014 this is embarrassing to admit \u2014 said, \u2018Hey, I hear the documentary class is really easy; you wanna take it with me?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Yeah!\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. \u201cSometimes, people ask me if I wish I were still doing journalism, and I always kind of bridle because I am doing journalism; I\u2019m using all the things I learned (in journalism school), and I\u2019ve been doing it ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, you don\u2019t. You definitely don\u2019t,\u201d he instinctively said, before expanding, \u201cActually, (here\u2019s) 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,) \u2018Here\u2019s my idea for the film,\u2019 and then the material says, \u2018No, we should be this.\u2019 And you go back and forth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the phone, Green passionately illustrated this \u201cback and forth\u201d dialogue by impersonating the two voices. Though it was incredibly admirable, the quote above has been simplified for clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He concluded by emphasizing this dialogue, calling it one of the things he loves most about documentaries. \u201cIt\u2019s much more interesting than anything I could think of. The world is way more interesting than my imagination,\u201d Green said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As someone deeply interested in the concept of the oldest person in the world, it seems apt that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1520,84145,143,145,144,73488,84142,73487,84144,84143],"class_list":["post-176682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-interview","tag-josh-penn","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-park-city","tag-sam-green","tag-sundance","tag-susannah-mushatt-jones","tag-the-oldest-person-in-the-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}