The latest Marvel TV series doesn’t look anything like a Marvel TV series. And that’s what show creator Noah Hawley had in mind for “Legion”; "4.1 Miles" refers to a small strip of the Aegean Sea where tens of thousands of migrants try to make the treacherous crossing.
Oscar-nominated short documentary '4.1 Miles' personalizes the refugee crisis
Just 4.1 miles of water separate Turkey and the Greek island of Lesbos. Between 2015 and 2016, 600,000 migrants made the treacherous crossing.
Men, women and children fleeing conflict in their home countries pack onto inflatable rafts and small boats headed for Greece. Often the boats break down or capsize, which is where the Greek Coast Guard comes in.
The efforts of one captain, Kyriakos Papadopoulos, and his crew to save as many lives as possible are the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary short film “4.1 miles."
The film was directed by Daphne Matziaraki. She made the documentary as her thesis film while she was a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Matziaraki followed Captain Papadopoulos and his crew for three weeks, but the rescues shown in the film all took place over the course of one day: October 28, 2015.
Interview highlights:
On her first encounter with the refugee crisis on the island of Lesbos:
The first day that I arrived I decided that I was not going to take my camera and I was going to go to the eastern side of the island, which is the side that is close to Turkey, where the boats are arriving from. It's about an hour-and-a-half drive and it's a winding road and ... as soon as I arrived, I saw people coming up on the road, alone, wrapped in plastic blankets. Really old people. It was cold, it was freezing. I remember it so well — the expression that these people had in their eyes is something that I will never ever ever forget ... you could really tell that there was something, so much trauma in their eyes that it shocked me so much. I had just driven for two hours, and they were just walking that same road after having fled war and having done this deadly journey.
So that was the first shock. Then I arrived on the beach and suddenly somebody opens the door of my car and pushes in a very old woman. She had hypothermia and she was blue. She couldn't talk, she was unconscious. And they pushed her into my car and told me, "Take her to the hospital." I've never been so scared, so shocked. I was trying to push the clutch in my car and my leg was shaking. I had to drive this woman two hours to get to the hospital.
On the opening scene of the film, when a crew member on the boat handed her a baby and told her to put her camera down:
I decided before I went there that my role as a filmmaker was to tell this story as accurately, as realistically as I could. I didn't know how to do CPR, I didn't know how to help, so my best shot was to stay out of the crew's way and to film this. Being on the boat, the reality was completely different, however. The boat is tiny. The crew members are not trained to do this, they are not even trained to give CPR. Their job involved routine border patrol around the peaceful waters of Greece, and they don't even have the basic instruments in their boats to deal with such an emergency.
I'm saying this because when they were called out on a rescue and then they found a boat packed with families and babies, the crew and the captain were as panicked as the people on this boat. The scene is completely frantic, chaotic. Everyone is shocked and in complete fear, and so was I. So when I'm asked to hold the baby, there is no second thought in my head [of], Oh no, actually I'm going to film now. I did what I was asked to, and there was no second thought. And that's because this boat and this situation is really, realistically, the fine line between life and death.
On what she hopes viewers take away from the film:
The film is about the refugee crisis, of course ... But for me, it's also about something bigger. It is about life and death and it is about how we are all the same in this. So when these people are forced to live or die this way, because they really don't have another option, it's our responsibility— for us that are in a safe place and have other choices — to be able to have an understanding of how similar we are. And maybe not to be so afraid of this "other."
How embracing the uncanny led to the unique look and feel of 'Legion'
There are plenty of superheroes in movies and on TV these days, but "Legion" makes it clear that there's still room for more.
The show exists within the "X-Men" universe and centers on the character David Haller, who's been told he's schizophrenic. But others try to convince David that his reality is altered, instead, by his superpowers, which include telekinesis and telepathy.
“Legion” airs on FX on Wednesday nights, and it debuted last week to rave reviews and huge ratings. In many ways, the series feels more like a psychedelic immersion in the landscape of Haller’s mind instead of a comic book show. And that subversive approach can be credited to the series’ creator and showrunner, Noah Hawley, who previously adapted the Coen Brothers’ cult classic, “Fargo,” for the small screen.
There is still some "X-Men" DNA in “Legion.” Among the show’s executive producers is Lauren Shuler Donner, who has been running that movie franchise, producing every film since 2000.
When John Horn sat down with Hawley and Donner on the Fox lot recently, they talked about the series' distinct visual language, the timeliness of X-Men's message of inclusion, and how their pursuit of the uncanny made the show unique.
Interview Highlights:
It's clear from the first episode that you're making very specific choices about the look and the feel of the show, from the cinematography and production design to the composition of shots and the use of music. When you're talking to your department heads about the things you want to keep consistent, what were those things you kept coming back to? Were they emotions? A feel? A look?
Hawley: The comic book is called "The Uncanny X-Men," and I really fixated on that word, uncanny. It's such a fascinating word. Sigmund Freud wrote this essay about the uncanny, which is really about what it is about the supernatural or the horror genre that's so frightening to people.
He fixed on something that I found really interesting, which is that the scariest things are not new things — the scariest things are when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways. In a haunted house story, your house isn't supposed to do those things, right? A child's not supposed to be possessed.
Those elements create this sense of the uncanny, this unsettling sense, and to the degree that a mental illness is kind of a haunted house story, and the fact that those elements are laid into the show, that became something that we would talk about with our department heads. A lot of times, they're looking for linear or literal translations of things — costumes, justifications for things.
It makes the script coordinators crazy because of the continuity issues, but in my mind, David's memory of an event and the reality of an event are two different things, so continuity isn't an issue for me. There was a learning process for everyone, myself included, in terms of designing the show and thinking about the logic of it.
The X-Men, as a group of stories, are distinguished by this idea that the things that make people look to be outsiders, or mutants, are actually gifts, or things that can be incredibly powerful. David's a bit different, because he suffers from mental illness, and mental illness is something he struggles with because of how it affects his reality. As David's medical condition becomes part of the story, how do you use it in what you think is a respectful way, but also in a way that illuminates what its possibilities might be for David?
Hawley: We had a scene in the pilot that didn't make it into the final cut. It was this moment where he's talking to his psychiatrist, and behind the psychiatrist we see this man levitate up into view outside the window. And it turns out that he's a window-washer, but there's a moment for David where you understand that this is his reality.
He sees things that sometimes aren't there, and then sometimes he sees things that really are there but are just odd. If he were to acknowledge that there was a guy floating outside the window when he wasn't there, he would seem crazy. But if he were to act strangely about looking away from a guy washing the window, he also seems a little nuts.
I think the dynamic of the mental illness — obviously he's told for most of his life that he has a mental illness. And then he's rescued from this place and he's told that he doesn't, that actually these are his powers, that he's telepathic, he's telekinetic, et cetera.
And then there's a third possibility — maybe it's both, and maybe having this power and having been treated as mentally ill all these years has certainly created a personality that he has. The power and the character dynamic are the same in a way that's really exciting as a writer to explore.
Donner: And that's the part of the X-Men franchise that is in "Legion." Usually a character's power defines the character.
The X-Men movies have been, to a lot of people, very clear in terms of having a message about what it means to be considered an outsider, and what it means to be set apart from the rest of society. Do you think there's a similar thematic message that carries through to "Legion," in terms of how people judge [others] who are different from themselves?
Donner: Oh, very much so. Tolerance is at the core of "Legion" and the X-Men franchise, and I don't think you can tell a story within the X-Men world without it being about an outsider in some respect.