“Are You Scared?” – Kate Bradford Interviews Barbara Kopple

When Barbara Kopple began shooting HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. in the early 1970s, no one in America was very concerned with the controversy over striking coal miners that was sweeping through Kentucky and the American South. That would quickly change.  She was threatened, nearly run over, and even shot at as she captured the efforts of these Appalachian miners to get a union contract. With a compelling and shocking story, alongside a haunting soundtrack from local musicians, HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. was honored with an Academy Award in 1977, forever solidifying it into cinema history. Barbara Kopple, then only 27, has gone on to become one of the most prominent documentary filmmakers in the world (and she’s not stopping any time soon). This winter, Cinema Eye honored HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. with it’s Legacy Award and Hot Docs will screen the film for audiences in a special presentation followed by a discussion with Barbara Kopple herself.

I was lucky enough to have the chance to sit down with Barbara one-on-one to discuss the film, her career, and what’s to come. I tried my best to be professional around someone I have admired for so many years (I even wrote a term paper on her in 2nd year University!) She proved herself to be just as down-to-earth, cool, and kind as I had hoped.

K: When you were making the film, did you ever imagine that it was going to resonate with people so much, even so many years later?

B: No, when I started making HARLAN COUNTY nobody cared about what I was doing. I couldn’t raise funds, my parents and my grandparents, and my brother and my friends would give me little bits of money or tape or film or whatever. Nobody believed in it except for me, and it was sort of in a way refreshing because it meant that if I fail, nobody has their heart set on me anyway and it’s okay, so I’m gonna do it.

I remember we were machine gunned with semi-automatic carbines, and I called my mother after that and said “Hi Mom!” and she said “What happened today?” and I said “Well, we were machine gunned with semi-automatic carbines today,” and she said “I forbid you to stay there another minute, you come right home!” and I said “Only kidding!” and I never said another word about it until they saw the film for the first time at the New York Film Festival.

K: That’s the iconic moment of the film, really. There are so many great moments that you managed to capture, but that moment when one of the gun thugs literally points the gun directly at you and we hear you say “Don’t shoot!”, that is a moment that is so jarring and really hits home how serious the situation was there.  What was that like in that moment?

B: I think when you’re 20 you think you’re invincible and you think you’re going to live forever, so you don’t think about that. You think, okay! Don’t shoot me! I’m here for a reason. The place where I was really scared, though, was on the picket line where everybody had guns. The miners had guns, and the gun thugs had guns. I went up to one of the organizers, and I felt these strange juices, like fear, in my mouth. I just said to them, “Do you think they’re going to shoot at us?” and he said “Well they did yesterday.” I asked him “Are you scared?”, and he’s this big tough miner guy, and he said “Yeah, ain’t you?” So that was a time that I felt it: they could just all start shooting at each other.

K: And what made you decide that was the story you wanted to tell? This was your first movie solo, correct?

B: Well, I had done a collective called WINTER SOLDIER which was about Vietnam Veterans. And, I mean, I started out making this film doing the Miners for Democracy. These were coal miners right out of the coal fields who were running for office, and their promise was to “organize the unorganized”. I wanted to see if they would keep their promise, and the first place was Harlan County, and that just became much more than the campaign.

K: It just grew and grew, then. And there were murders happening through all of this?

B: Well, there was a miner who was killed by a company foreman, and that’s what catapulted the whole strike and that’s how it was settled. And we were told “If I ever catch you alone at night, I’ll kill you!” and I said “I promise, you won’t catch me alone at night!” Also the chief organizer when I first got to Harlan County took me into his room, and opened this case, and said “Well, which gun do you want?”. I had never shot a gun before. So I figured, okay well I have to step up to this. There was this tiny little pink gun, and I said “I’ll take this one!”

K: So you had a gun on you as well while you were filming?

B: No, I took it, then left it in my room.

K: You weren’t comfortable with that situation?

B: No, no. I think that you don’t put a gun on you unless you know how to use it and you are going to use it.

K: I would agree with you on that. 

B: I would never want to hurt anybody.

K: There’s a moment you capture where one of the miners wives, one of the organizers, pulls a gun out of her bra. 

B: Yes, Lois Scott.

K: Yes, and she says “You’d be crazy not to have a gun out here”. For me, that was a moment personally where I went woah, everyone has a gun and is hiding it, and they could use it at any moment. 

B: The first few days I was there, there was some kind of quarrel between two of the coal miners and one of them got shot with a .38, and he was driving around in his car 2 days later with a sign on it saying “.38’s ain’t shit”. So, these were men and they made me go through all these tests. Like they made me drink white-lightning, and I understood what it meant to be blind drunk.

K: Is white lightning like moonshine?

B: It is moonshine, yeah. I chewed tobacco… [makes a disgusted face] none of the things I grew up with.

K: So they welcomed you into their community?

B: Not at the beginning. At the very beginning, the first day they were there, we were like New York young hippy dippies. So the women didn’t give us their real names. They called themselves Martha Washington and other names of historical women. Betsy Ross, Florence Nightingale and whatever. They said, you can be on the picket line, but you have to be there at 5am. So I said, “okay cool”. It was raining [that morning], and there were no guard rails on the road where we were driving, and another car came and went schoop and [cut us off]. We rolled the car over. We knew we needed to be on the picket lines, so we left the car there. We crawled out, carried all the equipment to the picket line. News travels fast in Harlan County, and the minute we did that we were embraced and loved and had their trust and they put us up in their houses and took care of us.

K: That’s awesome! So, one thing that you do in the film is you show a lot of stock footage of the Bloody Thirties when the Harlan County miners last protested. It gives a sort of idea that history is repeating itself. Now when you look at the issues of unions, unionized workers, blue collar workers today in America, since it’s a topic you also cover in AMERICAN DREAM, do you think enough has changed? 

B: No. I think that kind of love and caring and lust for unions and the working person is not there like it used to be. People are being told “you can’t vote for a union or you won’t have a job”, so I think the union movement has decreased. I mean, I’m not an expert on it, but in the United Mine Workers alone used to have 150,000-200,000 workers and now they’re down to to 25,000.

K: Your most recent film is RUNNING FROM CRAZY with Mariel Hemingway that premiered on the OWN Network. What’s next for you?

B: I’m doing a film on Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. She’s a soul singer. And I’m finishing up a film for this magazine called The Nation. I’m also doing a film that I haven’t started yet on homeless vets.

K: So you’re very busy!

B: I love it!

K: Do you think you’ll ever get tired of it?

B: Never. No. It’s too wonderful. It’s too fascinating to make these really close alliances with people. You’re really in their lives and you tell this story that nobody can erase. It’s wonderful. I feel so alive and privileged and honoured to be doing this work.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. screens tonight, Thursday May 1st, in the Isabel Bader Theatre at 6:00pm. The screening will be followed by an in-depth discussion with Barbara Kopple (tickets are still available, go fast!)

For more from Kate Bradford, visit her site: www.katehasablog.com