Interview with Michael Rubbo

A conversation between Tommy Shenefield, Augusto Hacthoun, and filmmaker Michael Rubbo on his 1974 documentary Waiting for Fidel.

TS: You've made documentaries in Australia, Canada, Vietnam, and of course, Cuba. With that universal perspective, what did you find unique about filming Waiting for Fidel in Cuba?

MR: Well, as you say, I've always enjoyed going off to foreign places, exotic places, and so on, hoping to keep an open mind. And to have an adventure, really an empathetic adventure, because I really like engaging with people. I like to not to cover up things, but I like to give them their best shot. I like for things to come across intimately and warmly to the extent that I can manage to make that happen. So it was quite exciting. Now, I didn't plan this trip at all. I was recruited to do a simple thing, which was an interview. And I didn't know much about Cuba. I knew it was a place that a lot of Canadians went for vacations in the winter. But apart from that, I'd never been there. And so it was a pretty open, clean slate as far as what to think or what to expect.

And so this funny situation developed whereby this very rich man, Geoff Stirling, this millionaire, had this friend, Joey Smallwood. They were both from Newfoundland, and they had this teaching relationship. And I knew nothing about this, I just knew I was going to Cuba on a private plane. I had never been in a private jet before. And I went to the airport and met these guys and off we went. But I sensed immediately that this was going to be quite funny, because of the way they were teasing each other. I thought this was really good.

One of them, Joey, the little guy, the bald guy, was very enthusiastic about the trip, very enthusiastic about the fact he had met Fidel. And here he was being invited to Cuba personally by Fidel. And we were going to make diplomatic history because the relationships with America were bad at that time, not nearly as bad as now perhaps, but they were sort of bad. And Joey thought it didn't have to be this way. There didn't have to be this sort of conflict between the two countries. And he had the possibility of doing some diplomacy that could be important.

Geoff, on the other hand—we thought he was paying for it, it was very confusing at the beginning. He'd come to the [National Film Board of Canada], which is a government agency, said he wanted to work with me going to Cuba. It wasn't clear who was actually funding this thing.

I think we thought he was. He certainly provided the jet. But his interest seemed to be basically to discover that Cuba was on the wrong track. And he was going to tell them that they had to get their act together and become libertarian capitalists, again, or whatever. So that was the setting.

TS: In Waiting for Fidel there were all of these places that you were documenting on trips that had been scheduled by the government, as I understand it, when you went to the housing complex and the schools, right?

MR: Yes, that's true. We were in this house, you could say we were prisoners in a way. We’re in this mansion that used to belong to some American sugar baron. And we were waiting there for the interview. And we didn't know when it would happen. We thought it was imminent, could happen any day. And so while we were waiting, we were taken on tours of places that they obviously wanted to impress us with. What they were not expecting and what I was not expecting and what was so interesting was that we turned those staged tours, if you like, into these debates between ourselves. And in other words, we went to the impressive Lenin High School, and then when we got back, in fact, just about the moment we got out of the car, this hot debate on the lawn in front of the house started between Joey being so impressed that the kids there were given this work ethic, the idea that they were working for the country part of the day after they've been educated. Geoff hating this, saying they were stealing their childhoods from them, you know, and this was terrible.

Now, of course, our Cuban minders, if you like, were privy to all of this, they were hearing what we were saying. And the guy, I can't remember the name of the guy, the main helper, he was a very, very nice guy. And he would often have an amused smile on his face. But of course, all of this was being reported back to the authorities. And I think they were weighing up whether or not to let the interview go ahead, you know, maybe it would be too wild, maybe it would be too uncontrollable.

So I didn't care because I just thought, I mean, I wasn't really interested in doing the interview anyway, in a way, because I wasn't an interview type filmmaker, you know, I usually don't sit down people and ask them a whole bunch of questions like you're asking me, I didn't do that. So, to me, I didn't care that the interview didn't happen, although I was loyal to the idea of what I was doing there. So I was very happy that these debates were happening, because I've always loved talking about human nature, and what is society and what works best, you know, and fascinated by the experiments with socialism and communism, which had seemed to fail so badly. My wife now is Russian. So I hear all these stories about growing up in the Soviet Union and how bad that was. And it's fascinating to talk about, what's the best way to organize things. Anyway, so this trip seemed to be laying on a most wonderful opportunity, as sort of an experiment in terms of how people organize their lives. And so I just let it rip, and enjoyed it immensely.

TS: It's very impressive how with all of these limitations of the scheduled meetings, and Fidel not showing up, and Geoff Stirling wanting the 3:1 shooting ratio, and all these things, that you ended up with something that really goes against all of these conventions.

MR: And as I say, I was playing it by ear. I didn't know how things were gonna work out. But I must have sensed from the very beginning that, I mean, I've always thought the documentary should tell stories. They're just different from fictional films, the stories are more ephemeral, they're more open ended. They're more tenuous, they, you have to nurture them. But I always thought from the beginning, I'm telling a story.

The fact that I had the camera on the plane is very interesting. Now, of course, there'll be no big deal, because we have cameras with us all the time. But to actually have the camera there ready to go on the plane, this big camera, you know, with the sound and everything else, was a decision that had to be made. And I made the right decision. Because normally, you know, I mean, following what we were supposed to be doing, there was no point for me to film on the plane, you know, that was not called for. But I had this sense that something, you know, this is a process I want to record. So I had the camera that was great, because I was able to, first myself learn about these actors I was with, but then to get a little glimpse of them in anticipation. And of course, when you're telling stories, anticipation is everything. You know, when you set up anticipation for an audience, then what comes after is so much more interesting, because they're testing the anticipation of what actually happens. So there's Joey saying, well, I've been to Russia and I never want to see the sky over it again. But this is Cuba here, you know. This really intrigues me. Now, that was wonderful because it set up him, and then Stirling comes across a little bit more sort of neutral, seeming. Seeming to present himself as rather open minded, but you can see from the way he laughs that he's rather cynical about the whole thing. So I really, from the very beginning, decided to tell a story. And it's also why I filmed the cars going into Havana once we landed.

I regretted that I didn't film what happened at the airport. And I guess I didn't, because I thought I'd probably be pushing my luck too far. And sort of setting another tone too much, because what happened at the airport, while we were waiting for the cars, we were taken into some sort of VIP room. And we’re all sitting around a table, all these Cubans had come to meet us. And there was Geoff and Joey, and Joey was doing all the talking. And this teasing thing started, him and Geoff. So for some reason, he said, “I have to tell you that Mr. Stirling here is a very rich man,” and he went around the table, “he could give you a million dollars, and you a million dollars, and you” and he went right around the table, like this you know. And he said he still would have a lot left. Oh jeez, what’s going to happen on this trip. It was such a funny moment, I would have loved to film it, but it would have been so over the top. And so set a sort of a weird tone to the film, that maybe I never would have used it even if I had it filmed. But I didn't think to film it because it was too, too in a certain sense disrespectful of everybody really, you know, especially with the Cubans who didn't know what was going on at all.

So but after that, I really was thinking of storytelling all the time. In other words, getting shots of Joey pacing the lawn, carefully nurturing the flavor of the house, you know, the feeling of this mansion that we're living in, the beautiful lawns, the statuary, the elegant dining room, the way we were served by people in white. I was celebrating all of that, because I was on this other trip, this other agenda. Maybe the interview would happen, maybe it wouldn't. But I had a story to tell about two eccentric and opposing characters faced with this wonderful opportunity for debate, which was Cuba.

TS: I had watched your Documentary Journey film, about Waiting for Fidel, And and you had mentioned that you had prior to working on this documentary, you'd been interested in Cuba. But you hadn't been there. And there was a week between when you were told about this project, and when you were on the plane to Cuba. So, obviously, that was very abrupt. Before or while you were in Cuba, were exposed to any of the documentary filmmaking that was going on in Cuba?

MR: No, not really. I mean, it was a very quick situation, we're only there a week. Actually, I stayed on. The idea of staying on was that Joey had prepared all these questions for Fidel, which never got to be asked. And there still was thought to be some slight hope that an interview might happen. So we did this funny situation that I recorded all of Joey's, we created a sort of a sound booth. So his questions were very nicely recorded in the big house, we created the sound booth. And I recorded all these questions, and I was going to play them, if perchance, after they left in the private jet, we got the interview.

Well, no interview ever happened, but I ended up staying there about six more weeks. And I made another film called I Am an Old Tree, which is not nearly as interesting as Fidel because it doesn't have all the dramatic tension. But it was based on a doctor, a lot of it was about the medical service, which was very good. But it's based on a doctor who was rather ambivalent, but he said, I'm a little bit like an old tree. He said, You know, you can train a young tree up against the wall, a fruit tree and make and grow any way you like, and it will perform. He said, I'm a bit too grown to be really fully incorporated in this great experiment. So I Am an Old Tree was the title of the film. But there was a lot of frustration. We were in a huge hotel in Havana, I don't remember which one it was called and we were waiting and waiting and waiting for permission to go ahead and do extra filming. And the crew was drinking daiquiris all the time and getting very drunk. The whole situation was frustrating and funny. Anyway, that happened afterwards.

TS: Even after the film, did you had any exposure to the Cuban documentary tradition?

No, I really didn't. And I regret that because it's a good one. And they had a very active cinematheque there, a Cuban sort of, you know, repository and screening situation and so on. But I never had any time to plug in to that. And, to my disappointment, I never went back. I don't know why that is because being in Canada, I had every chance to go back, you know, flights were very cheap. And Canadians were streaming down there all the time.

AH: By any chance, is the tree that shows up in Waiting for Fidel a metaphor of that other little film that you did afterwards on your own about the doctor?

MR: Which tree, the tree in the garden of the house? Oh, that's an interesting idea. I don't really know. But I was very amused to see these ads going the wrong way. And I was thinking of Geoff with his poem, his cynical poem about the happy workers. And that was the link there. And yeah. I can't fully explain that. But I just thought, This is interesting. I'll film that and make something out of that.

TS: There's definitely a lot of humor throughout the film and a lot of energy. It seems like this idea of youth and focusing on children is something that's very prevalent in both your fiction and nonfiction films. Do you think filming something about Cuba in the relatively early days of its revolution, do you think that filming something in its developing stages interested you?

MR: Well, I did think it did seem like a very young country, perhaps in terms of this social experiment, particularly. And the kids at the schools were so interesting, and charming, really, you know, and they really did seem to have a sense that they were part of something, some great experiment. And they were happy, oh, really happy. America was quite happy at that time too. I had gone to Stanford as a student and enjoyed it very much. Apart from Vietnam War, it was a pretty happy experience. But these kids were very happy. The only doubts about it that I had, in a way, was it was like, everybody was in a huge choir. And they were all singing great songs, very melodic, wonderful songs, the nation was if you like. Could you leave the choir? What happened when you got bored with the songs? You know? No, you couldn't, you know, there was really wasn't that choice.

Because, I mean, people are very perverse. People want bad things. A lot of the time, you know, we know that from just looking about what television serves us all the time. It's always the bad, you know, the awful, the grotesque, the bizarre, the twisted, you know, that's the, that's the meat of television, of our entertainment industry. So, what do you do when you have a place where things are very sweet and calm in a way, and there's no opportunity for any of that? That was my, my sort of take on the whole situation.

Although I was so busy making the movie and following my eccentric characters, I don't think I didn't really develop a philosophical sort of assessment of it at the time. But as you see in my class, I'm more reflective about it and what it meant than I was back then.

AH: The differences of opinion with Mr. Stirling, were those new or recurrent- the difference of opinions between you and and Geoff Stirling, where they knew they emerging Cuba, or they were recurrent

MR: Well I’d never met him before. I didn't know anything about the man. I didn't even know the significance of his love of this novel, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which I now take to be a sort of a hymn to libertarianism. I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know anything about his background. I didn't know for instance, very, very intriguingly, that he actually paid for the Beatles in their hotel room in Montreal, when John Lennon and Yoko were in the bed together singing Give Peace a Chance. Hold on now, that would happen later. Yes, it hadn’t happened yet. So I couldn't have known about that in Cuba. But the man was eccentric. And I think he prided himself on having been very good for Newfoundland. He had a television station there, and radio stations and so on. And he really thought he was very good. But Joey was much more, if you like, effective and powerful in Newfoundland because he'd been the premier. And he was the one who brought Newfoundland from being an independent entity into Canada. So this is a man of great, Joey, of greatest historic importance in the Canadian story.

TS: Were you in touch with either of them following the release of the film?

MR: Somewhat, there was a very dramatic situation. We had to sort out who owned the footage. And the Film Board, finally, in some way, bought the footage from Geoff Stirling, because as I say, he provided the transport, and so on, we had all this argument about how much footage to shoot. But somehow we sorted that out. And there was this very dramatic screening. I've always screened my films prior to finishing them with the people in them. Now most people never do that. They say that's sudden death. I mean, why would you give somebody a screening ahead of time, because then they will have the right to demand taking things out and so on, you know, but I always thought that was the fair thing to do. And also, it meant that I was facing the problems that would come anyway, head on, beforehand, you know. And if they had valid points, I might make changes even.

Anyway, so there was a screening. And Joey was there and Geoff was there. And he bought an entourage from his Montreal radio station. They were sitting all around him in this small theater. So the film finished and he said something, — anyway, he said something very derogatory about it. And Joey said, Oh Come Geoff, Come on, come on, come, come. If we hadn't been so impatient, we would have got that interview. You know, you pushed your plane coming back to pick us up. So Joey was very placatory about it and saying it was really our fault in some way, and Geoff was saying, No, no, no, it wasn't. It's all symptomatic of the corruption of the system, somehow. Anyway. But then somebody very bravely from his entourage piped up and said, but Geoff, that's you, that's a great portrait of you. And he laughed. And he said, Well, I'll do a deal with you. Okay. You give me all the footage, the outs, the unused footage, and I will make the film that we should have made out of that material. And then you can release this one. So we said, okay, so we gave him all the outtakes, I regret it. Now, in a way, we didn't have any reason to have to do that. I regret it now in a way, but that was the deal, and we released the film.

I never saw Geoff after that. But he he sent me letters quite often teasing me as the price of gold went up. He thought I was so stupid not to take his advice and invest in gold when it was $100 an ounce. And he kept sending me these letters saying see what's happening. And sometimes there was even a gold coin in the letter just to remind me of what I was missing. And we had on and off contacts over the years. I think he really enjoyed the film in the end. He used to show it on his television station late at night. And he would get Joey on and they would continue the argument.

In recent times since making my class, I've been in touch with his son, who told me that he really liked the film and enjoyed the whole experience. And I said to the son, because I wanted the son to see my class. And I said, "Am I being fair to your father?" And he said, "Yes, you are."

AH: Did he [Geoff Stirling] ever make his film?

MR: No.

TS: Do you think that film is sitting in an archive somewhere, the outtakes?

MR: I don't know what happened. We could ask the son I suppose. I think long scrap the whole thing about, you know, film, it's pretty hard to store. And especially the soundtracks on this on the the sound that was on the brown tape, that prints through after a number of years, so the sound becomes unusable. Just as an aside, I made a film about Margaret Atwood, which is pretty problematic. But the Film Board kept all the rushes of that. I didn't know they'd done that. And when a colleague of mine called Peter Raymont recently did a portrait of Margaret, a modern one, he used a lot of my old footage. So somebody could have done stuff with our own footage. If it still existed.

TS: You see a lot around about how this film is your most famous film or your most well known film. And obviously, it sounds like it was at least one of the most difficult ones to work on. But I don't know that I've seen you anywhere say that it was your favorite film. So I'm wondering, are you happy that it's your most well known piece?

MR: Well, I have no choice about it. I mean, it's just it's the old rule. It's got lots of tension and drama in it, you know. And some of the other films don't have that. I've often wished that I fell into a situation like that full of contradictions and paradoxes. I was looking for something as the same, but it didn't come off quite the same, but it's still an interesting film. It's called Solzhenitsyn's Children. It's not in my class, actually, because I'm not completely happy with it. But the premise of the film was, here were all these leftist intellectuals like Bernard, Andre levy in Paris, who were all suddenly doing a U-turn, they'd all been very pro-Cuba, very pro-Vietnam, very pro, this very, very pro Russia. And now they've read Solzhenitsyn, and they did this massive U-turn. And they were now saying, we were wrong, we're wrong, we are wrong, we got it all wrong. It's all nonsense. You know, the utopian dream of the socialist dream is absolute nonsense. And being very clever French intellectuals, they were making a lot of money out of the situation, they were writing books about it. So I went to Paris, and I had this guide, Louis-Bernard Robitaille, this French Canadian journalist, and he took me around to meet these people. And also to the bookshop and he would slap down all the books they were writing. This one, and this one, this says this, this says that, you know. But it doesn't have the neat drama of it of Waiting for Fidel, but I was exploring similar terrain.

TS: So essentially, you feel that you understand why Waiting for Fidel is your most well known film, and you don’t take issue with it?

MR: No, no, no, not at all. I think it's it's inevitable, and I'm happy. I mean, a lot of people like Alex Gibney like it. Louis Theroux likes it. Mike Moore supposedly was inspired to make Roger and Me because of it. So that's all pretty good. And I use that of course in hoping to get people to see my course. I do very much like some of my later films, I made one about called Much Ado About Something which explores the contentious idea that Christopher Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare's plays. I advanced that case, very interestingly. I don't say it's true. But in the process, I do a little bit what I do in Cuba inasmuch I discover all these interesting passionate characters. And it is as much a journey in character and obsession as it is in a theory. But I have very good people to like Mark Rylance, the actor, saying that he, you know, when he played Shakespeare in that study, when he played Hamlet, saying he just couldn't believe that the man who wrote this didn't have massive learning, you know, formal learning. And of course, there's no evidence that Shakespeare had any learning, Shakespeare the man, whereas Marlowe, of course, went to a wonderful school in Canterbury, and then he went to university for eight years. Anyway, I really enjoyed doing that film. And I think it's done pretty well.

And then more recently, the last film that was like a funded film was about a woman called Olive Riley, who at the time of the film was 104 years old. My editor had suggested we do a film on the phenomenon of people living to great age. So we explored that. But then we met Olive, and she was such a feisty, funny character in herself, such a good value in film terms, that we abandoned the idea of an essay trying to find out, you know, the truth about centenarians. And we just did a story about Olive going back to Broken Hill, which was a town in the center of New South Wales in the desert where she was born. And it's a lovely film. It's called All About Olive. I'm very proud of it. But it's not nearly as famous, Neither of those are as famous as waiting for Fidel, but that's life, I don't care.

AH: But was the Vietnam film controversial?

MR: Yes, it was somewhat. It became a sort of a bit of an organizing film, anti-war people used it somewhat, but there's also a very gentle film so didn't really have it didn't really have the, the stuff in it to you know, it wasn't that polemical. And that was partly because I was constrained, I worked for the Canadian government. I mean, just getting to Vietnam was a strangely difficult process as you can imagine. Because you know, Canada being an ally of the states and basically backing the war. And I got there not on false pretenses, exactly. WhenI went there, the program's subject matter was to be about the foster parents’ plan about Canadians sponsoring Vietnamese children, when I got there. And I met the lovely people doing that, I wrote back to Tom Daley, my producer, and I said, “Tom, in good conscience, I can't do this. I mean, it's just so at variance with what I'm feeling and seeing around me that I want to just see what happens.” And he said, “Fine.” And so I went off and explored the world of these underground journalists that I'd met, had a little office called dispatch, and they were writing stories about the war. And, in fact, they were quite powerful and they were very interesting characters.

I'm always looking for characters. I have six principles for making a documentary. And that is what's at stake, there has to be something at stake, then the characters have to be very, very interesting. Everybody is potentially interesting, but some people will, let's face it, are more interesting than others. Okay. That's life. Thirdly, story, you know, there must be a story line. It's not like fiction film, it's not clean and neat. It's ephemeral, it's tenuous, it's disappearing, it's like a snake going down the hole, you have to grab it by the tail and carefully pull it out. So that's number three. Number four is it must be touching, the whole story must be touching. And that's often forgotten. And number five is what is usually used to program documentary films. And that is, what is the big picture? What's this all about? Is it about old age? Is it about anorexia? Is it about wealth? You know, fine. That's the big picture. So there must always be big picture elements to your story, as there was in the Cuban film. But it shouldn't be the main thing. You know, if it doesn't ride on good storytelling, and characters and all the rest, then it's not going to be a very good film. And number six is simply, is the whole thing strangely compelling? You don't know what that means. But you certainly know it when you see it.

TS: I was looking at a 1980 interview you did with Alan Rosenthal. And I remember in that you had, I don't know if I would agree with this, but I think you said that you yourself weren't very fascinating. Do you still hold that opinion?

MR: I don't think myself very fascinating, no. I see myself as more of a go between character as I was in the Cuban film. I mean, I think I'm effectives that as you go between character but I have no desire really to take the front of stage and to upstage these two, the really interesting characters, which is Geoff and Joey. No, I always play that role a little bit of a go between if I appear in a film of my own.

TS: Would you say that you're reluctantly appearing in your films, or you're just so fascinated that you wind up in them?

MR: Well, it was a very much frowned on thing to do. And it just sort of happened by accident in a way because I realized that you are always part of the story to some extent. Now, you can keep that out of it, but you're never really the cinema verite fly on the wall. You're not a fly, you know. You're there, you're an interacting person. And you have an impact. The first film in my series, Persistent and Finagling, made with a group of women in Montreal, who were doing a very early Environmental Action. They kept asking me, Well, what do you think Mike? How are we going? I mean, are we credible? And I could have said, Well, look, I can't give you an opinion. I'm just observing, you know. But little by little I got sucked into saying, “Well, I think, you know, you're, you're so worried about this guy Blaker that you would like to lead your tour. But you're letting him manipulate you. So I would start giving opinions. And it just seemed to be how life is, you know, that you really don't hold back.

So many people now of course do personal films, for better or for worse. I've just seen one about the amazing Jonathan that this guy did, who apparently was a fan of Waiting for Fidel. Jonathan a magician, crazy film. And then of course, I've just seen one by Lauren Greenfield about wealth, about America's obsession with wealth, where she brings herself into the story and she brings her mother into the story and so on. So it's very common these days. And sometimes I think it works well. Sometimes it's candid, and let's say honest, because it's acknowledging a reality. And sometimes they get so obsessed with themselves that they rather lose track of what they thought they were making the film about.

TS: Certainly a major influence on this kind of proliferation of that type of filmmaking is how now anyone can make a film and put it on YouTube or something like that. And you yourself are somebody who you said that the last funded documentary you made was that came out in the 2000s?

MR: Yeah. A bit after that. 2005, I think.

TS: But since then, you’ve released some small pieces on YouTube.

MR: Hundreds.

TS: Well, even better. But can you talk a little bit about taking advantage of this, of this newer avenue of distributing things?

MR: Yeah, well, I mean, I think I was very lucky. At the time when it became sort of very paralytic raising money for films. I, you know, along came YouTube. And I had already taught myself to shoot, and to take sound and do all those things. So I was a one man band ready to go. And so I started making films about local issues in the village here, dogs on the beach, or whether they, you know, when they started to take away our rights to walk our dogs on our lovely beach, I made films about that. I made films about, there was an attempt, they sunk a ship off, just off our beach here, as a dive platform ship called the Adelaide, a warship went down there. And a lot of people were very, very against it, I made seven films about that. I became obsessed about cycling, I discovered the bicycle, I hadn't ridden a bike for ages and ages. And I thought that we were doing the wrong thing in Australia, because it was all sports cycling, head down, helmets, and so on. And what we shouldn't be doing is cycling like they do in Europe and Amsterdam, sitting up straight, no helmet, you know, riding relatively slowly and using the bike as transport. I made many films about that. I've recently been politically active. I've made three films about Julian Assange and what's being done to him, what is not being done for him. Yeah, so hundreds of them.

AH: So you have more freedom now?

MR: Yeah, complete freedom. I don't have to ask anybody for permission or to get the material vetted. But I usually do end up showing it to people, if there's somebody important in the film, with a point of view, then I always show the clip to the person before I put it up on YouTube. But apart from that, yeah, free as the breeze.

AH: What was the hardest thing of when you were making your earlier films? Was it the funding or the permissions or rounding up the people?

MR: The funding was very easy, because I worked for the National Film Board. It was such a dream situation. I mean, I had been at Stanford to study film at Stanford. And we were watching these Film Board films and thought they were so great. And every single person in the class wanted somehow or other to get to the National Film Board and work there. But I was the only one who did. And that was partly because I was an Australian, so there was this sort of Commonwealth connection. And they let me in. But the whole vérité idea is that you plunge in, it's like plunging into the river of life, and you got your head camera in your hand above the torrent, and you're trying to negotiate your safe passage down the river and you don't know what's going to happen. And that's the thrill of the whole thing in a way.

TS: Now that presumably you're doing everything digitally, do you have any sense of what your current shooting ratio is?

MR: It's not that high, but I don't think about it. It's no longer an issue.

TS: There's no more yelling match about it.

MR: No, I mean, that was, that was a very energizing argument for the film. But he was quite wrong, because, and he was also being somewhat disingenuous, because he had recruited me because he'd seen sad song of yellow skin, which was at least 20 to 1 ratio. And so if he’d done any research at all, he would have known that I was this type of observational filmmaker, which eats up the film. And so he didn't. And I could have thrown that at him on the lawn, when we were having an argument, but I wanted him to win that argument. It was very important to me that he won that argument, or at least seemed to dominate, because I just felt that he was quite capable of phoning Montreal and saying, “This is over. You know, I'm pulling the plug on this.” So I had to make him feel happy.

TS: If you were to go back to Cuba, would you make a new documentary, or multiple documentaries?

MR: Well I’m very old now, I don’t know. I’m 82. Maybe, especially since now it’s so easy to do, yes I would. I guess I would, yeah.

AH: We look forward to seeing it

MR: I owe Cuba another visit, you know.

AH: In the film somebody mentions, what if we were to come back in 15 years and do it again?

MR: Yeah, that's true. We always wondered whether Fidel saw the film. There were rumors that he had seen it or whatever, you know, it was not conclusive. I didn't follow up enough, what the Cuban film community thought about it. I think there is some evidence that they saw it and were intrigued, but I don't know for sure. It's a pity really isn't somebody who's picked up this supposedly famous film, and made it a project to find out all the repercussions after it. You know. Who saw it, what happened, you know, what about the people in it, and it would be very fascinating. Somebody, some grad student could have picked it up, and had a wonderful time.

Any last questions? I’ll just tell you something I've told nobody. I don't know why I haven't told this. But when we went to, you know, we were trying to get Fidel. And you know what, we were trying to bribe him. Not directly, because, you know, he was too remote for that. But we let it be known that we had this fabulous present. And what the present was—in those days, sound was recorded on a big tape recorder called a Nagra. And it weighed about 10 kilos, and the sound man had it over his shoulder, and it was linked to the camera remotely, electronically. So now those were what we used in all documentaries. They were famous, they were made in Switzerland. Anyway, Nagra had just come up with a little tape recorder the size of a cigarette pack. And these were very exclusive and very new. And they took tiny little tapes. And we let it be known that we have one of these to give to Fidel.

AH: Oh, well, maybe he didn't hear about it.

MR: We told the minders several times. We were desperate to bribe. Isn't that shocking? I mean, it was really, really, underhand, I think.

AH: No, it's an incentive. Not a bribe.

MR: I’ve never told anybody else that story. But that's true.