ALL THE WALLS CAME: Ondi Timoner on Creating Transformative Films - Hosted by Heather Lenz

Our special guest this week is the award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner. Timoner founded Interloper Films and is known for movies about visionaries challenging the status quo and personal documentaries that reveal the bittersweet side of facing seemingly impossible challenges. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy and chairs the Nonfiction Subcommittee for Special Projects at the DGA. Timoner is the only director to win Sundance's Grand Jury Prize twice—for DIG! and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Both films are in MoMA's permanent collection. Her numerous credits include her 2022 documentary LAST FLIGHT HOME, about her father's end-of-life journey. It was Oscar-shortlisted, Emmy-nominated, and earned her the Visionary Award for Observational Filmmaking as well as the Humanitas Prize. Today we’ll discuss her recent documentary, ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN, about the historic LA fires that took her home and town of Altadena. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Today we are joined by our guest host, filmmaker Heather Lenz, best known for directing and producing the Sundance documentary Kusama Infinity. Our special guest this week is the award-winning filmmaker Andy Timoner. Andy founded Interloper Films and is known for movies about visionaries challenging the status quo and personal documentaries that reveal the bittersweet side of facing seemingly impossible challenges. She's a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy and chairs the nonfiction subcommittee for special projects at the DGA. Andy is the only director to win Sundance's Grand Jury Prize twice for Dig. And we live in public. We both uh pardon me, both films are in MoMA's permanent collection. Her numerous credits include her 2022 documentary Last Flight Home about her father's end-of-life journey. It was Oscar shortlisted, Emmy nominated, and earned her the Visionary Award for observational filmmaking, as well as the Humanitos Prize. Today we'll discuss her recent documentary, All the Walls Came Down, about the historic LA fires that took her home and town of Altadina early in 2025. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Well, thank you so much, Claire, for the introduction, and thank you, Andy, for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us. Today we'll discuss your new documentary, All the Walls Came Down, about the historic LA fires earlier this year. Please take us back to the moment you found out about the fires that devastated your neighborhood. What was it like to learn that your home was gone? And how did you decide that you wanted to make a documentary about it?

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Hi, thank you for having me. Um I uh was in Europe at the time filming a film about the Holocaust. Uh, and so I was, I think, waking up when the fire broke out in Altadena. It was like five in the morning, and I was trying to catch a flight from Rome to Budapest with my wife and composer Morgan Doctor. And um obviously, like my brother was just evacuating my mother, and uh Eaton Canyon was on fire, and the palisades in Malibu had been burning for most of the day. So um we were trying to find a place for them to evacuate five five adults and seven pets, and we didn't know what to do. I mean, fit besides finding a place for them to go, we were pretty powerless. Um, and uh, and then you know, checked the Watch Duty app through the day, and it never updated, never said our street burned. I finally interviewed the founder of Watch Duty who explained to me that they get their information from first responders and there were no fire trucks or evacuation orders in West Altadena, so we didn't have uh any intel whatsoever. Even two days after the fire, um we it still didn't say that our house burned down. Um, but I heard from a neighbor, my neighbor Randy from across the street, via uh, you know, text message around 6 p.m. in Budapest. And it was just obviously shocking and very, very difficult to wrap my head around the information that, you know, the home that I had raised my son in and that was my sanctuary and my safe spot in the world was gone, just completely vanished in a night. It was very shocking. And uh, you know, and I didn't know that I would make a film. I didn't even think about making a film. Um, obviously, at first I just thought I just thought about, you know, I didn't think about anything. I just was shocked and horrified to find out that my mom's cat was in the house. So that's what really threw me over the edge. And then, of course, insurance makes you list every single thing you've ever lost. Um, and so that is a very painful, traumatic process that everyone, every one of my fellow climate refugees from this time of of the of this fire, uh, complained about, you know, how horrifying it was to do their insurance lists. And I remember going ahead with my shoot because I had an interview with a Holocaust survivor the next morning in Vienna, and I did not feel like a cancel on him. And I felt, so I just put off all of the details of FEMA and Red Cross and insurance lists and everything, and went about doing my job. Um, I went to his house. He opened his arms to me, 87-year-old man who, when he was six years old, was in a concentration camp, and his father had been uh murdered by a lethal injection to the heart. And so he says to me, I'm so sorry for what happened to you. And, you know, in that moment, I just had so much perspective. Uh, how can how can he even compare to what he's been through, you know? Um, and so that's that's the gift of filmmaking. I I sat down with him and did the interview, and um, Legendary, the company that I'm making this film for, you know, offered obviously for me to cancel uh because the house burned down and to cancel the rest of the shoot. And I said, Well, I'm gonna interview Joseph, but I don't know about uh going on from there. So let me let you know after this interview. And by the time I was done with the interview, which has now become sort of a pillar of that film, um I was I was just I was just sure that creating something new in the wake of all this destruction was the right energetic move to make, if that makes sense. I was like, wow, we just did this interview, and first of all, it gave me so much perspective. And, you know, hearing about the bombing of Dresden and hearing about the death march that he survived and praying to God at the age of six that he should die, you know, none of that was happening for me. I just lost everything in a night, you know, and uh it's hard and harrowing, and it's been very painful since then, but it's nothing compared to that. So I kept going with the shoot. I told Legendary, let's keep going. And about a week later, when I was done shooting in Italy, uh, got on a plane and I opened my computer to do the insurance list of lost artwork. And that's when I realized all of my letters and journals and that my son's cards to me when he was growing up, he would do these incredible cards, that they were all gone. And that was when I just had let out this sort of guttural cry on the airplane on Delta from Rome to New York. And I just sort of like didn't stop crying for 10 hours and just kept, you know, swiping my phone, trying to find any images of them in iCloud. And that was that's sort of when the material meeting the spiritual hit me, if that makes sense. Um, so that's my story of like the immediate aftermath. But once the dust settled a little bit, um, I had my movie Dig Double X opening in New York, and I had decided already that I was just gonna keep going with my originally scheduled life. So I went and opened that film in New York, and it was very heartening to see it on screen as I would walk in for the QA's. I would see Dig Double X and I'd think, oh my gosh, you can't burn that. You know, it's on screen. So that was that made me feel better. And then, and then yeah, I I I told Maggie Contreras, who's a filmmaker herself, she made Maestra, she had reached out and said, I'm gonna produce the shit out of your life when the fire happened. And I thought, that is so kind, but I don't even know what that entails, but I'll take any help I can get right now. So she had already kind of been on board with getting replacement, you know, passports and documents for us or whatever we needed. Um, and I said to her, Hey, do you think you can rustle up some cameras when I get back? I want to go and see the house. I'm gonna try to get past the National Guard, which had the entire, you know, town blocked off because the whole town's destroyed. And uh I'm gonna, you know, try to get past them with some documents. And um yeah, I she got some cameras. I I just thought, if I don't film this, then I won't have any matter with which to transform the experience. If there's something to transmute it to, right? If there's some kind of powerful message to come out of this, it would be irresponsible of me, uh given who I am in this world and what my my job is on this planet, to uh to not film, you know. So so that's how it happened. That's that's how I first started. And we actually, you know, we were the first cameras on the ground in Altadena. We um IndieWire wrote me a note saying that I was a journalist and covering it for IndyWire because Ann Thompson had written an article about me. And she I said to her, Hey, I I need to get to my house and I'll give you photographs of me going back if you can get me a letter to get past the National Guard. So that's how we did it. And that was, you know, maybe a week, week, week or nine days after the fire, I think it was.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

So well, thanks for um going into all of this. I know it's quite um, it's just it's still shocking. Um, I believe you know my in-laws also lost their house in the Ultadena fire, and so they lost, you know, everything, all the family photos, everything. And one of the things they lost was a a photo of my uh mother-in-law's father who was killed when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. So people just lost, like, you know, all these just so much. But um, anyway, documentary filmmakers typically follow other people or often follow other people, sometimes catching them at vulnerable moments in their lives. And I'm wondering what it was like to record not only your neighbors and community, but also yourself and your family as you processed your loss.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

So I had made a film called Last Flight Home about the last weeks of my father's life. And what's interesting about that in relation to this is that I didn't know the whole time I was filming it that I was making a film. I was sort of not in denial, but I was just focused on giving him care. And I was more worried about forgetting a single word he said because he had had a stroke when I was nine, and I can't remember him able-bodied from before that. So I was in a full-scale panic because he was doing medical aid and dying on March 3rd. And I had, you know, a matter of like 15-day waiting period with him uh to remember him and to hear anything else he said and to visit and to have him leave the planet knowing how much he impacted us. So I was focused on that and set up cameras as a way to survive it more and a way to, yeah, bottle him up somehow. That then turned into a feature film because it kind of spiraled out of a memorial video my sister asked me to make for his Zoom memorial, like a week after he passed away. I sat down and I reluctantly turned on the hard drive of the footage I'd recorded, and I realized, oh my gosh, he's alive in this machine and I am able to spend time with him. It was like I thought it would be really, really sad and would stir too much grief for me to sit there, but I actually found it quite healing. And so that all is to say that that's what caused me to film when I get came back to Altadena. And I just kind of am familiar through that process of making Last Flight Home with the benefits of doing that, right? Like if you can actually capture this kind of trauma as it's happening, um, when we are just padding our way through it and we feel like we're walking on the moon, literally, none of us having been through anything like this before, then you have something, you know, uh that is potentially as healing as it is, as it was traumatic. So, like almost the darker the tragedy, the crazier, right? The chaos, the chaos. If you can manage to document during that time, I've come to realize um it's a gift to other people. It can create a gift for other people. I I would never have made a film just about myself going through this. Um, I am an important part of it because I have my own iCloud and I have access to that kind of intimacy so I can allow the audience into a certain depth of process and grief and trauma that the other people in the film, I can't quite get to that level with them because I'm not in their shoes. I'm not them. Um, so that that's why I play, I think, an important role in this film. But um finding my neighbors going through extremely different circumstances, each one, you know, whether they're not insured because they own their own homes or they have um, you know, a lack of insurance and they can't afford to rebuild and they don't know what they're gonna do, they're homeless now, or they're living in their cars, or they're living in Airbnb from Airbnb to Airbnb to motel and on. Um, you know, my brother, even who's just uh was a mile and a half south, and his house burned down, and there were thousands of houses between us. Like I lived by the mountains, but he lived in town, you know, there would be no way a fire would get to his house, you know. So every story had a role to play in this. And um, and I was just so grateful that people like like my neighbors, the wormleys, let me in. They let me into their travel lodge motel room. They laid bare their grief, they shared, you know, shared um even even their son, you know, shared his story and his trauma over losing all of his toys. And everybody's perspective was is extremely important to what this film has become. Um, but then of course, I met this the silver lining, which is Heavenly Hughes and Um and My Tribe Rise, you know, and the community coming together. That that really is the glue, and that's really the point of the film. So um, you know, it's sort of like the structure's really interesting to me. It's like almost like dropping a pebble in a pond or a bomb dropping, you know, and I go from like ground zero and then out from there in these sort of concentric circles to really experience the community. And I'm just sort of the way in, if that, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

So what did you learn about the Altadina community through the process of making the film uh that you hadn't fully understood before?

SPEAKER_02 17:05

I didn't know how much we all loved our town. I don't know that anybody had really talked about it. It's not like we stood around saying, isn't Altadina wonderful? But it was so, so magical. Um, it was just this very, very special place. Um, you know, up by the mountains, peacocks, wild peacocks flying overhead, walking through the driveway. You see some footage of them in the movie. They're still there, thank God. But they're I I worry about them eating toxic sludge. Um, but uh yeah, I mean, you know, bear. I had a bear in my swimming pool, you know, big, huge Diodora pine trees, and um just we loved our town, all of us. So I didn't know how much we all intentionally loved our town. I didn't know that the reason that I lived in such a diverse community was because of redlining. I had no idea. I knew Owen Brown, son of John Brown of the Liberators, you know, that that they that he settled there because it was a bastion of liberalism and um and he was a fugitive at that point for starting the civil, you know, helping to start the civil war. And I knew that like it was a it was largely a black community, um, and and that everybody had really quite sizable, seem a lot of people had pretty sizable lots of land and independent stores and restaurants. And I just thought it was a great place to live in that way, but I didn't realize that that a lot of the black community ended up there because they were trying to settle in Pasadena or East Altadena and they couldn't actually settle there. Uh, they were forced to to buy in West Altadina, they couldn't buy in East Altadina or or Pasadena back in the 50s and 60s. So um I didn't I learned that through this process. And I also learned from, you know, Heavenly and from others that they're not surprised and they weren't surprised that fire trucks didn't show up. Um they were they were used to this kind of discriminatory practice. And um, you know, I it was sort of very eye-opening for me and horrifying for me to to learn all this while filming this film. But um, yeah, I mean, I I also didn't I didn't know, and I guess I should know, you know, from watching many, many documentaries um and making many myself, uh, the resilience of the human spirit. It never ceases to amaze me, you know. I mean, in the wake of all of this, and uh you can see in the film the flattened land. I mean, it's it's like as if the place was bombed, you know, it's just destroyed and flattened. Um, the town is gone, mostly gone. And um, and yet, you know, everybody's coming together and the walls have come down, and we are uniting to take care of one another, to form block communities, you know, like we have like block captains now, and we are we are sharing ideas and architects and builders and getting loans for one another and stopping, you know, we have a petition to stop the foreclosures and trying to bring that to the governor right now, which I hope you can maybe link to with your podcast. Um, because the reality is the power company is actually responsible for the fire, and they they've admitted that, Southern California Edison. And so the settlement uh is going to mean that everyone will have the cost of rebuilding covered by the by the um this fund, this wildfire fund that California has. And so, really, it's about getting families to not get pushed out right now by predatory banks and financial institutions and bridging the funding. Um, so that's really why the film came as fast as it did and why it's short is because it's urgent. It's urgent. And so I didn't, you know, I didn't know that my my neighbors, for example, didn't have insurance um because they owned their own homes. I didn't know that if you owned your own home outright, you didn't have to have insurance because I have a mortgage, you know. So I had no idea of these circumstances, but it's not, yeah, it's not fair. And it feels like it's my responsibility as a neighbor and a community member of Altadena for you know 14 years to, and really actually 21 years, because I moved to Alta Dena, a different house, the one that my mom and dad lived in, um, which is in a three miles away, that little house in Eden Canyon. I I moved there actually 21 years ago. So, and then I moved to the house that burned down 14 years ago. But yeah, it feels like my responsibility to try to help save as much of the fabric of the town as I can by using film as my weapon.

unknown 22:15

So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Well, as you mentioned, the film was made quickly. How much time did you spend shooting it? And how did you decide which elements were the most important to capture and include?

SPEAKER_02 22:26

My name, my uh, my nephew, Eli Timoner, came a few weeks after the fire. He lives in New York, he's 25, and he uh wanted to come and be with his father and mother, who had lost everything as well, and um my brother David. And so he came and he said, Aunt Andi, I want to help you film. And so he got into his PPE gear and started filming with me. And then, you know, I had to go back to Europe and finish the film about the Nazis. And so he held down the fort and kept filming during that entire time. And then I took over for him and he went back to New York in May. And so we filmed for about six months. He and I, and then a number of volunteer DPs. Who I'm so grateful to, all of them. And this team of, you know, people just we stayed on it and we filmed for 71 days, six months worth. And then it became clear that the town was getting ripped apart by reverse mortgages and banks and foreclosures. And that if I wanted to impact the future of Altadina itself, I needed to make the film as fast as possible. And that's something that I've never really been in a position like that, Heather, where I'm filming something that could impact and change the course of history for a lot of people who I who I consider, you know, my extended family. So I needed to finish it quickly. At the end of July, I sat down and just started cutting. I have an editing partner on this film named Jesse Gordon who worked with Eli, my nephew, to really pull clips together with another amazing story producer who uh I've worked with and worked with on another film, um, Sydney. And so like the three of them kind of worked to pull scenes together. And then I sat down and just started cutting um and cut it very, very quickly for Telluride. Like I actually um turned it around, you know, within a week, uh, an edit for Telluride. And then they said, I mean, they said it would take a miracle to get in because it was like two months late or something, and uh, they were already scheduling the festival. And I said, Well, I believe in miracles, and I sent it off anyway, and uh they are just so wonderful to take a look at it, you know, even to take a look at it that late is extraordinary. Um, you know, for curators, I just want to shout out to Telly Ride because that's just so cool. And then the next, very next day, uh I got a message saying, You're right, it's wonderful, and we're gonna make a space for it. So now we then we had a month and the pressure was on to actually make the movie. Um, because yeah, I had to proof, it was almost like a proof of concept I sent in there. And then I had from one month, the last shoot day was July 31st. And the, I mean, we're still shooting, but the last shoot day that's included in this film uh was July 31st, and then it premiered August 31st, one month later, if you can imagine. And then it actually opened in theaters two weeks after that. Um, and it was sold out, sold out, sold out, and it extended, and then it went across town, and then it was sold out in New York. It's just been quite quite the quite the anthem now for Altadena, where the town, you know, it's post the town posts about it, and the town, all the town forums and pages, um, everybody comes out and it just played All Saints Church and it's gonna play Waldorf High School, and it's gonna, you know, the community has really taken it to be their own, um, which is wonderful. And it's being used to raise money and resources for the town, which is great.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Yeah, I'm so glad you're getting it out there the way you are and getting so much support. I noticed in the credits um that the film is an LA Times short documentary. And I'm wondering how you connected with them and um what role they played in making the film or did they acquire it after it was complete? How did that work?

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Sure. Um, so great partners, the LA Times. Um they originally were interested in a film of ours called The In Between, which is on the LA Times website. You can actually see it now. Um, it's about the only hospice for the homeless in the country. And it's a it's a very amazing place to spend time. So it's a short feature, it's 70 minutes, and they don't usually release short features, but it was inspired by an article of theirs that I read in the LA Times that my mom cut out for me. When I was on uh the road with Last Flight Home, I took this article with me everywhere, and finally I got a chance to read it. And um, it was describing this place where you know the homeless took care of each other. And um, it's funny because it's kind of a parallel with this in a weird way. Um, but I never thought about that till this moment. But yeah, it's about community and it's about the empowerment that they feel as humans, that their lives actually matter um to each other and uh how extraordinary and unique that is. Um, it's almost like the only uplifting film about the homeless I've ever seen. So, anyway, that's called the in between, I and and between. And um you should check that out. But I was on a Zoom with them planning that release, which was last month or something. And I mentioned that I was filming in Altadena and that I had been filming the fire. Um, and they said, Do you think you could finish it this year? And I said, I don't know about that. I think I was in Canada at the time. I was like, I don't think so. I mean, I wasn't planning to, you know, I was planning to kind of go the distance, and then we started talking about because their coverage of Altadina has been so extraordinary. I don't know if you've read or kept up with it, but I mean they should win every award for journalism that there is because it's been extraordinary. So I um, you know, they they filled me in on everything that they were witnessing, and then we got to talking about what I've been documenting. And I said, Well, I'll be happy to show you whatever I come up with, you know. So when I sent that off to Tell You Ride and I got instant news, I sent it off to them, and they immediately were like, Oh my gosh, we love this thing so much, we love it so much, we love it so much, we have to have it. And they were asking for it, and I was, I wasn't sure what, you know, whether or not, and I didn't move quickly, but they were just totally committed from the very beginning. So ultimately, I feel like passion wins the day, you know, and it's really about having a distributor who really cares, you know. I mean, we're heading into LA tonight to do a screening with the LA Times at the Culver Theater. Um, and tomorrow there's a lunch at their offices about and a panel about climate and that I'm on. Um, you know, and they're doing what they can in their way. And they're gonna release the film on the anniversary of the fire, which I think is perfect. Um, so yeah, so that's kind of how it happened. It's very, it's a very friendly partnership. It's more, it's more like a partnership. Um, you know, I'm free to run and do with what the what I want with the film beyond, but they get the right to publish it first. So I see.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Well, it's great. I'm so glad you're having a great opportunity or a great, you know, collaboration with them, and they're helping you get it out there.

SPEAKER_02 30:15

So one more thing I should mention is that some of the fire footage in the film, a lot of the fire footage in the film that's extraordinary, is filmed by them. So that was part of the deal, and that was that was something that I thought was so important. Um yeah, their coverage of the fire itself on the ground. I would shout out Karen Fauchet, who uh is involved with the film as an executive producer, also um, and shot a lot of that footage on the ground. Like I wasn't in LA to shoot the fire, you know what I mean? So um, so some of those shots are are LA Times shots. And that's that's an extraordinary gift and contribution to the film itself. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Want to make sure yeah. Well, linking, you know, obviously you've made so many films, but um, you know, the two that are just so personal about your family are this, you know, the recent film about the fires and then last flight home about your father as he faced end of life decisions and ultimately chose to exercise his right to terminate his life, which just taking audiences into that is just, I mean, it is amazing. It's so raw and bittersweet and everything. But um, there's a scene in it where one of his visitors asks him to think of a way to communicate, you know, after he's gone with his loved ones. And so tying it back to the film about the fires, there's a scene where you find his bathrobe in the midst of all this devastation. Everything is burned at your home. It's just all gone. And yet here's his bathrobe untouched. And it's I just wondered what what was that like for you to find that?

SPEAKER_02 31:56

It was so inspiring um to suddenly amidst all of the destruction after, you know, digging to try to in this rubble. I was thinking about it last night, you know, stepping down, walking up the stairs of my house and then dropping into a pit of the just ruins of our life there. Everything, you know, because no fire trucks came, even the day after or the day after that. So 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, uh windstorm of 90 mile an hour winds with fireballs. The fireproof safe that we dug out was just completely incinerated, all of my money gone, all of my mom's jewelry that was in that safe destroyed. I mean, gold just melted to nothing, to nothing. Um, all of it, opal, everything gone. Uh, everything that, even in the bathroom where the robe was hanging, it was all destroyed. And yet, here is this cotton bathrobe from the 70s that dad wore all the time. He always wore this robe. He loved this robe. And um, when he passed away, I took the robe home and I brought it to my son and I said, Hey, this was Popop's robe. You know, do you want to wear it? It's like it was his favorite robe. It's super comfy. I tried to convince Shuki to wear it. He was like, No, I want nothing to do with the robe, of course. And so I put the robe away. I have no idea how it ended up on the hook on his shower enclosure, which is the only thing standing in the middle of the house for some reason. And right there on the hook is this bathrobe. And it's so weird, Heather, because I walked all around the house in, you know, my space suit or whatever, and we set five of us were all over the place, um, trying to find the safe, like trying to, you know, all this the first visit back. This is. And um at the very end, we we see this orange fabric fluttering in the wind. And there it was, the bathrobe. I I it was just shocking, but also it filled me with hope. You know, it it it reminded me of what I was saying at the very beginning of this interview that like I didn't know what would happen. I didn't know how I would feel, I didn't know what I would do, and I but I knew that I should film because there's we don't know why things are happening at the time that they're happening. And we we don't, we're not privy to everything that's going on. We think we are, and we think we're in control and we think we know everything, but there's more to this life than meets the eye, and there's more to death than meets the eye, and there's more going on than we can see and sense on the surface. I think we only sense probably 10% of it, you know? So I have no idea how the bathrobe got there, but I do think you're right, dad said so many times he would watch over us, and my friend Lucy Hayes asked him, How, how will we know, how will we know, how will we hear from you? And he said, You'll know, and I will, I will communicate with you. I'll find a way. And uh, you know, his first flight attendant, because he had an airline back in the day before the stroke, he had an airline, and that first flight attendant, if you recall in the last flight home, she was visited with him on Zoom, but she called my mom after the fire and you know, was consoling my mom about the death of her cat, Rosebud, because they evacuated to my house first and and they couldn't get the cat out from under the bed when they had to evacuate my house. Um, and they thought she'd be there in the morning, uh, but she obviously died in the house. And she said that Eli left the robe to tell you that he to show you that he brought Rosebud home. Um so so maybe that's what he was doing. I don't know. Um there is no there is no explanation that makes any scientific sense as to how the robe is still there. So I framed it. It's now framed.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Well, for audiences, I definitely recommend watching both of these films together, you know.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Last flight home first. That's what I we actually had a screening out here. I live in Joshua Tree now, and uh they they screened a bunch of my films over the November 1st and second weekend, and they were like, Oh, well, we'll screen all the walls came down and then last flight home, because that makes sense. You screen a short before a feature, you know? And I said, No, I think you really need to do it the other way because you need to see daddy say he's gonna watch over us that many times, and then you need to see the robe hanging there.

SPEAKER_01 37:01

So well, documentary film legend Sheila Nevins was an executive producer in The Last Flight Home. And I'm wondering how you connected with her and what it was like to work with her.

SPEAKER_02 37:13

So she and I have have known each other for decades. Um, and she originally, I think, tried to buy We Live in Public in 2009, and uh it ultimately we didn't make the deal because um they they wanted internet rights, and there was no internet component to HBO at that point, and we wanted to keep those rights, so we didn't work together in 2009, but um she watched Last Flight Home. What happened was it premiered at Sundance, but Sundance went virtual that year. So it was dad died in March 3rd, 2021, and then January 2022. Another really fast film, by the way. The other fastest film of my life was Last Flight Home. I think these things that are meant to be here, they just kind of come flying through me from a personal, the really personal ones, you know, they it's almost like giving birth. But anyway, so I take uh last flight to Sundance, and um we're all set up with our screenings, and then Omicron happens, and there's a spike in the COVID virus, and Sundance decides to go virtual at the last minute. And so it goes virtual, and um, and anyone in the country can see it that night. And I received a poem. Sheila tends to write in like these Sheila Nevin's haikus almost, and she wrote me like a poem that night about how she was silenced by the film. There were no words to speak about it, and she started to pursue it at that point for MTV documentary films. And HBO also was interested, and so it was a it was a bit of a bidding war between the two. And the funniest thing is she called me um one day and I was in the bathtub. And I said to Morgan, my wife, I said, Oh my god, is Sheila Nevins on the phone? What do I do? And she said, Well, answer it. So I answered it, and Sheila said, Andy, I love your father. I love your father, and I could find, I could pick his face out in a crowd. I could, I would know your father for the rest of my life. I will defend him. I will sh, I will give him, you know, the best possible release. I love your father. He reminds me of my Uncle Seymour. And she went on and on and on, and uh, you know, give me the film, give me the film. And I said, So, well, I'll be in New York next week. We can sit down and talk about, you know, uh the film and like what you might do distribution-wise with it and what Paramount could do. And she said, Oh no, if you don't give me the film, I'm never talking to you again.

unknown 39:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

So then I was like uh uh speechless myself. And um, you know, I got off the phone very nicely. I said, Well, I'll get back to you soon, and contacted my family on the family text chain and said, Oh my gosh, Sheila Nevins just said she's never talking to me again if I don't give her the film. And much to my surprise, my brother wrote back and said, You can't have Sheila and Evans on your bad side, you need to give her the film. So gave her the film. And then she showed up like five times. She watched the film every single time it screened in New York. She would sit through the film. I'd say, Hey, Sheila, do you want to like go talk during the film? No, I need to sit through the film again. And so she just loves the film so much. It's very, it's she's a wonderful, wonderful human being and a very dear friend to this day. Um, she came, you know, she came to all the walls came down when we had a screening in New York. And um, yeah, we talk and text on a regular basis. She's a just an incredible champion, especially of women filmmakers, it seems. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Wow, I love that. Um so uh how did you get into filmmaking and what advice would you give to aspiring uh filmmakers?

SPEAKER_02 41:04

I just picked up a camera one day and uh I started filming people in toll booths and convenience stores when I was like 19 on a road trip. And I asked them, you know, what makes them happy, what they fear the most, and what they think of gays in the military, because that was like an issue and a debate at that point. And it started all kinds of interesting conversations and insights, and people loved sharing their perspective. And this is before all of the social media and all that stuff, and all the internet, even you know, so it was kind of like people weren't as camera savvy, and it was just not that you couldn't do it today, but it was just really fun, and it made my road trip across America really fun. And one guy I asked, uh, you know, what do you think? What do you fear the most? And he said, women with video cameras. Um, and so that became the title of my first film that I made at a public access station uh that opened in New Haven, Connecticut. I was a student at Yale, but they didn't have any production facilities back then. And uh yeah, it's called 3,000 Miles and a Woman with a Video Camera. And I thought, wow, this is so interesting and so much more fun than writing a paper. Let me see if by my senior year I said to the all the professors who I was um, you know, going to their classes at the beginning to see which classes I wanted to take, I said, I'll take your class, but can we have an agreement that I'll make a film instead of write a final paper? And they said, uh, sure. So I took the classes of the five professors that said, sure. And one class was called Transgressive Women in American Culture. It was about women in prison and women who broke the law. And I used that to get into women's prisons and I made my first feature. Um, it was called Voices from Inside Time, about well, actually, that's a 60-minute film about women in prison. And then I met one woman who saved so many women's lives and was their spiritual guide and mother. Um, her name is Bonnie Jean Foreshaw, and I got a chance to meet her on the very last day I was in the prison, and her story was so extraordinary. I ended up dedicating myself to telling that story after I graduated, and that became my first feature film, The Nature of the Beast. But it was really driving out, and then that eventually got her out of prison. But that was like it took 20 years to get her out of prison. Um, but she died a free woman. Um, and we were there when she got out of prison in 2015. But yeah, a travesty of justice that she the nature of the beast is actually a quote from the arresting officer that said he didn't have to give her a phone call or a meal. Why would he do those things, you know, unless she asked for them? That's the nature of the beast. Like she's guilty. She she's presumed guilty, not presumed innocent. So he had it all backwards. Um, and it was another case of our racist government and system. Um, but anyway, I felt like the alchemy I could practice, you know, having those tapes in the back of the car, driving out of the prison with these stories and freeing some part of these women from inside time, from in this parallel universe that's funded with our taxpaying dollars, but we don't, you know, get any insight into how they're being treated. To be able to drive out with those tapes and share their stories um felt like practicing some sort of alchemy. And that's what made me fall in love with this very difficult profession that is almost irrational, is irrational, documentary filmmaking. Yeah. A lot of today called the Alabama solution that is uh is is unbelievable about the conditions in prisons which have degraded so much since even then I was there, since when I was there. Um so check that out. It's called the Alabama Solution.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Well, obviously, you're in an advanced stage in your career, but I'm wondering how you typically Typically fund your films and in your experience, what are the pros and cons of things like grant writing, crowd campaigns, pitching investors, and any other way you manage to pay yourself and your crew?

SPEAKER_02 45:23

What I do is I film um whatever it is that needs to be filmed. I have a film that I'm making next that might be my last documentary because I'm moving into scripted a lot more. Um I made Maplethorpe, you know, which is a film that I wrote and directed. Um and uh I'm gonna get back to doing that kind of work because it's interesting to me. But um I shot a film, we shot a film last year, 200 days in 10 countries. Um, and I have not edited the film yet. And so that's my next film. And the way that we did that was we just started doing it because it's about a couple that's struggling with a cancer diagnosis and adapting Victor Frankel's book, Man's Search for Meaning, into a screenplay. And it's the couple that wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, and it's really, really an extraordinary love story and really a thriller and a look at our healthcare system. Um, it's many, many things, and more than anything, it's also about man's search for meaning, which is about how we can't really control what life throws at us, but we can only control how we react to it, which is, you know, very much the idea of turning lemons into lemonade, sort of what I did with all the walls came down, too. Um and um and so yeah, we just filmed it. We filmed and then we created a sizzle, and that's what I recommend you do. You know, you film so that you can prove what you've been shooting and why it's important and why it's special, and then you need to rustle up some funding or just roll up your sleeves and edit a piece yourself. Um, at you know, cameras and uh media and computers are very accessible now, way more than when I started. You know, you don't need to be at a public access station on a shuttle editing system now. You can find nonlinear editing on your computer on iMovie or whatever. Um, and so, you know, it's not, I wouldn't say make a whole film on it, but you can. I have, you know, my friend Jonathan Kuet made tarnation on his iMovie. So you can do it, you know. So do the thing that you believe in. That's my advice. Make a sizzle and then start sharing it with people and ask them to connect you to whoever they think might resonate, this material might resonate with. That's how you do it. And you just you gotta be tenacious, you gotta hang in there, and you gotta believe that you'll you'll make it happen. It will happen if you just hang in there, you know, and you just don't give up.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

Well, that's great advice. For anyone interested in following your career and learning more about upcoming screenings, can you please share your website or whatever websites are relevant and um your social media handles?

SPEAKER_02 48:23

Sure. Um, so for this film and for the petition that we need you to sign to stop the foreclosures on our neighbors, it's all the wallscame down.com. Um, and interloperfilms.com is the main website where you can subscribe to our newsletter and uh starting a substack very soon. My name is Andi Timoner, and that is my name on Instagram, and we have all those handles on Instagram. And I also, yeah, recommend a film that we also put out this year called All God's Children, uh, which follows my sister, who's a rabbi and who you know in Last Flight Home, and her partnership with the Black Baptist Church. So she, her temple, and this church come together to try to stop racism and anti-Semitism in Brooklyn. And it's a five-year experiment, um, which is very pertinent to our world today, where we're so polarized and don't listen or talk to each other. So it's an interesting model to look at um and a crazy verite film, another crazy verite film. So um, but yeah, thank you so much, Heather, for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 49:29

And um and oh yeah, thank you. And is there anything else you want to add that I didn't ask you about?

SPEAKER_02 49:35

So the title, All the Walls Came Down, is about the fact that we needed something like this to happen for the walls to come down to really come together as a community and get to understand each other's circumstances and get to stand by each other as neighbors. And the message of the film, whether you live in Los Angeles or you live in Paris, is you have to get to know your neighbors and become a community before disaster strikes. We cannot count on municipal services to be there for us. We there are disasters coming of a level and magnitude like this fire that are impossible to fight, even aside from the discriminatory um theories behind why West Altadina was left to burn. Aside from that, there was no water in the fire hydrants, and it's really a uh a very, you know, very much a wake-up call. And it was a blind spot to a lot of us that we assume that when a fire happens, fire trucks show up. So just want to mention all the walls came down, means we live these siloed, isolated lives where we worry about whoever's in our house and that's it. And we need to go and know our neighbors' numbers and their children's numbers and get to be family with a larger human family to take care of one another so that when this kind of thing happens, we can help each other to survive. We had 19 deaths on our street. We had nobody coming to tell us to leave our homes. Um, and it's just it just can't happen again and it shouldn't happen again. So that's the bigger picture and the message of the film. And I just wanted to share that. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Well, I think that's an excellent point. And um, for anyone, you know, not in the area who may be listening, and when this was unfolding, and like I said, my in-laws lived in that same community. Um, we were trying to call them to see if, you know, how we could, you know, help them and find a place for them to stay. And the phone lines were down, you know, so we couldn't even reach them. So it's just pure chaos. And it is a good point that, you know, in the midst of it, you have to have some kind of plan of how you're gonna, you know, save yourself and not just with fires, but there'll be earthquakes and other things.

SPEAKER_02 51:59

So flooding in New York, I mean, it's it doesn't matter where you live, it's coming for all of us, you know. At this point, we've reached, we've gone past the tipping point. I made a film about climate change in 2010 with lots of solutions, none of which were fully adopted. Um, so it's just too late on climate level, as we know, and it's about adapting and it's about surviving now. And we have to survive as a community. We have to get together locally and make that happen. And um, anybody who survived at four in the morning in Altadena knows that they survived because their neighbors carried them out of the burning homes. So um, you know, let's let's do this before the disaster strikes.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Well, thank you so much for um joining us and for sharing all your wisdom and for your you know boots on the ground work in this community. And um, yeah, I hope I hope everyone can check out your film. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. And thanks everyone for listening.