Film

Faster Filmmaker Q&A: “We Were Here” Director David Weissman on AIDS in San Francisco, Expecting the Worst and How Not to Be a Downer

February 28, 2011 Jonathan Kiefer

“If you’re ever facing a natural disaster as extraordinary as AIDS was in the last quarter of the last century,” one testifier says early on in David Weissman’s historical and historic documentary “We Were Here,” “you should be so lucky as to be in a community like the queer community of San Francisco.” Co-directed and edited by Bill Weber, who also worked with him on the 2001 documentary “The Cockettes,” Weissman’s wrenching but rewarding new film reveals how the legacy of a terrible time is bittersweet. He sat down with me for a conversation about it last week.

Talk about your arrival in San Francisco.

I’d been living in Venice Beach in the mid ’70s. But I’d been here many many times. It was just like a revelation to come here. This is where the long-haired, creatively radical, hippie-spirited gay guys lived. I had not found that anywhere else. And so it just felt like home. The counterculture really embedded itself into the fabric of the city here in a way that it didn’t anywhere else. The city was just bubbling with activism, with theater, with sexuality. It was a wonderful time here. And you had this blossoming of the first gay community in the history of the human race. I mean, Greenwich Village had always been a place where people congregate. But this was a self-proclaimed community of free gay people. It was not a ghetto of people who were hiding. We were proclaiming our presence. And that had never happened before. Not with the same concentration. I decided that it was time to leave Venice, and San Francisco was so wonderful to come to. It was really me finally fully coming out.

Did you know you wanted to make films, or was there another goal?

I’ve never had goals. I’ve never had a plan. There’s a lot of reasons for that, personal reasons, but to a great extent it’s served me as much as hindered me. My life makes a tremendous amount of sense looking backward. Which is great. But looking forward I never could have imagined where it was going to take me. And there is an overlap between my lack of planning and the fact that I’m kind of a Chicken Little. I tend to worry about the future. I tend to see the dark potential there. I think a lot of Jews have this kind of thinking. I think it’s part of our heritage and tradition to sort of always be on the alert for something bad coming around the corner. My family escaped Europe literally within weeks of Hitler invading Poland. My mother died when I was 15. Or Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. I mean, I could go down a list of things that over the course of my life reinforced my sense that the future was always something to be alert to in terms of its negative potential. The defining paradox of my existence is that I’m an idealistic pessimist. I always see the dark future, but I think it’s always important to live idealistically in the present. Just in case things might actually turn out OK.

So what was onset of the AIDS epidemic like for you personally?

Yeah, the AIDS epidemic for me was just such an enormous validation of my darkest visions of life. It seemed like all of us were going to die, and before we died we were going to suffer terribly. There was the daily barrage of questions. Am I gonna get it? How is it transmitted? Who’s the next person I know that’s going to get it? What do I do when they do? What is that spot on my leg? What was that night sweat about? This was the content of our anxieties. And there was a very strong sense that at best the outside world was indifferent; at worst they were happy to see us die. It was terrible, and infuriating. The film doesn’t deal in depth with the rage. But there’s another more complicated piece of that, which is the piece within ourselves — for many people who had religious backgrounds, there was the question: Am I being punished? Are they right? So it wasn’t only the external homophobia.

How did you eventually decide to make this film?

It came up a couple of years ago in conversations with my then-boyfriend, who’s also a filmmaker, and much younger than me. He had not experienced but had heard me talk about the epidemic so many times. It was not something that struck me as something I wanted to do. But it didn’t take long. It just triggered a lot of stuff for me. My own memories from the epidemic, stuff around my family’s Holocaust experience. Another thing is how frustrating it is seeing movies on really important subjects that are badly done. Because you know that there won’t be a good one, once there’s already a bad one. And it felt very important to me that this story be told by someone who lived through it. I felt a huge weight of wanting to do this right, and also knowing how difficult that would be. I had tremendous anxiety all through the making of it that people would come to a screening and wag their finger at me and say, “You didn’t tell it right.”

What would not doing it right look like?

It’s delicate. I knew that I didn’t want a movie that was just going to be a downer. There is so much in this story that is beautiful. I only wanted to interview people who came here before the epidemic started. It was a magic and liberating place to be. Who was here impacted the way the city responded. When the epidemic hit, there were all these people who had a great spirit. But I wanted to avoid manipulation and sentimentality. That was key. I wanted to avoid it feeling like a survey of types. One always struggles with issues of representation and diversity, and I didn’t want to make a movie that would insult anybody. So I chose my interviews on the basis of not having anyone representing anyone but themselves.

It seems like an enormous emotional challenge.

We cried probably every day. Multiple times. That’s a powerful experience. It was beautiful. It was a healing process. Part of what we would cry at was not sadness but the beauty of what people were saying, and a creeping awareness of how this film was going to impact people. Like, Oh my god, people are going to be watching this. There’s a kind of emotional intensity in this that I think is unusual.

What have you learned from showing it to audiences?

With the younger generation, some of them have been afraid to ask about this time. For some, it’s never occurred to them. Or it’s been like a family secret. So it really feels like this is the moment. One of the amazing responses from young people is the question, “What would I have done?” It’s a healthy kind of question for a human.

What’s next for you?

I’m going to be busy with this for a long time, which I have mixed feelings about. I mean, I’ll be living with it forever. Just like I’ll be living with “The Cockettes.” And I’m glad that I have “The Cockettes” to balance this out. You know, I don’t want to just be the AIDS guy. But I’ll be traveling with and talking about this film for a long time to come. It’s a lot to carry around. So I’m trying to go to film festivals that have beaches and nice hotels. After that: No idea what I’m doing next. I would be perfectly happy to body surf and sit around for the rest of my life. Well, not exactly. But I never know what I’ll be doing next. The only thing I know is that it’ll be something that I can’t imagine now.