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Features
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Bruce Weber's True Calling
Celebrated photographer Bruce Weber responds to the 9/11 tragedy with a poetic documentary that begins as a letter to his dog True.
Thursday, January 6, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Writer-director-photographer
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Photographer Bruce Weber is of course best known for his commercial work. Those Calvin Klein ads featuring models such as Kate Moss, Mark Wahlberg and Vincent Gallo are such a part of the cultural landscape that the images have become iconic. Meanwhile, Weber’s celebrity photos continue to grace the pages and covers of magazines such as Vanity Fair, Interview and W. In fact, one such spread can be found in the January 2005 GQ, with Weber turning his lens on rising star Kate Bosworth.
But in the summer of 2001, it wasn't models or movie stars that caught the Pennsylvania native's attention. Instead, it was New York, the city that he'd adopted as his own ever since moving there from Greensburg, Pennsylvania to study film at NYU. Weber did a lot of cityscapes that summer, his zest for Manhattan re-igniting as he captured it on film. He remembers thinking, ‘Wow! There are so many things here that I just haven't looked at in so many years.’
Then, hijackers crashed those two planes into the World Trade Center on September 11th, a cataclysm that shook the world and forever altered New York. In the outpouring of grief that followed, art flowed in photography, books, plays and movies. For Weber, his response came in the form of the offbeat A Letter to True, a documentary that is framed as a missive to the youngest of his Golden Retrievers. Since the fall, this poem of a film has made its way through art houses across the country. This weekend, it opens at Los Angeles' Nuart and Minneapolis' Bell Auditorium.
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Zeitgeist Films
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Canine peace corps
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When FilmStew recently caught up with Weber via cell phone, he couldn’t help but rave about the New Mexico scenery passing by his car window. “There are some mountains right now, the clouds are so beautiful," he exclaims, his zeal for snapping pictures present even when he is in no position to take any.
It is that ardor for images that propels A Letter to True. Like his last film, Chop Suey, the new film is a collection of visual and aural images that reflect its creator's vast obsessions and interests. Weber's response to 9/11 is certainly like no other. His dogs frolic; the late actor Dirk Bogarde celebrates his corgis in home movies; a young Elizabeth Taylor ponders the meaning of faith in excerpts from The Courage of Lassie; pooches prance down the streets of Manhattan; and a young man is transformed into a ringer for Taylor circa her Giant years for a Weber Italian Vogue photo shoot. Those images stand in stark contrast to others: documentary footage from World War II and Vietnam and a visit to a Haitian refugee camp.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Taylor at 2003 fundraiser
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The soundtrack offers similar juxtapositions. Weber reads his letter to True in voiceover, Marianne Faithful recites Stephen Spender's poem "The Truly Great;" Julie Christie reads Rainier Marie Rilke's "A Sonnet to Orpheus;" and Martin Luther King speaks of living a committed life. Meanwhile, Doris Day (!) sings "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries," Blossom Dearie warbles Rodgers and Hart's "Manhattan," and Joni James' vocalizes "I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night."
To Weber, the contrasts are natural, a part of him and, in the end, what the film is all about. "That's a little bit what my life is like,” he explains. “I think all filmmakers are really just doing a portrait of themselves, whether you're doing a documentary or a feature. That's really what my life is like, in and around and behind the making of my film."
Weber is adamant that the images, poems and music contained in A Letter to True are there because of what they mean to him. For example, he deems his experiences with Bogarde and Taylor, two people he befriended over the years through his photography, as amazing.
He goes on to pay tribute to Taylor by recalling how she brightened the day of a complete stranger when Weber asked her to call a dying friend of his. She did, staying on the line for nearly an hour to discuss doctors, her dog and the man's cats.
"Your world sort of opens up when you're a photographer,” he suggests. “I wanted to explain that you're sometimes thrown into these situations where people really totally express themselves," Weber says of his relationship with the two actors.
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Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com
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Christie at 1998 Oscars
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“I think that's something really fragile and beautiful and I wish that people did it more often. Maybe we wouldn't have so much trouble if they did."
It was the 58-year-old photographer's affinity for the animals in his life that came to determine the film's framing device. Since childhood they have been a source of friendship and affection, and sadness as well when a pet passes away. But Weber says he gets great joy from both them and other people’s pets, which he is always happy to photograph as well when asked.
"I just thought it would be really nice for [me] to be able to write a little bit [about my youngest dog],” he muses. “You know, like when you get a letter from somebody and it's really special. When people take the time to do that today, it's really meaningful. So I just wanted to write a little letter to him, just to explain things going on."
Weber remembers that immediately before 9/11, it was one of the most beautiful days he had experienced in all his years in Manhattan. He lost a friend on one of the hijacked planes, Berry Berenson-Perkins, and says now that while the tragedy left the city with a permanent hole in its heart, all New Yorkers have never appreciated their home more.
"I think that deep down inside, we always appreciated the city, we just didn't know how to show it,” he maintains. “It's a little bit like the way it connects to the way that you treat your friends or your loved ones or the animals in your life, where you take it for granted that everything's going to be there forever and it isn't."
In its own unique way, A Letter to True is Weber's plea for peace. Beyond 9/11, the photographer remains focused on the latest developments in Iraq and Afghanistan, for fear that they will slip into the realm of out-of-sight/out-of-mind.
“A lot of our promises and a lot of our reasons for doing things seem to get all confused,” he observes. “We all have such busy lives, that all that just seems to far away from us. By showing the Haitian situation in Miami, the illegal sort of keeping the people there, the families, I wanted to show that it could be in your own backyard and you don't even know it."
Since completing the film, Weber has slipped back into his own life, working as a photographer and preparing for the re-release of his Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary on jazz musician Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost. It returns to theaters this spring prior to its DVD release.
| Meanwhile, asked how our increasingly celebrity-obsessed society has affected his primary profession, Weber insists he has never been one to get caught up in the ebb and flow of his subjects’ lives. "I have very little interest in celebrities,” he says. “The only reason I'm in front of them with my camera is because those are so sometimes my assignments. But those aren't the celebrities in my life."
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Weber remains committed to photography, with a passion seemingly as burning as when he first started out. Asked to describe what he likes photographing the most, he can't. "People ask me that all the time and I always say what I'm going to do tomorrow, because I just feel really lucky that I get to do what I do,” he says. “I try to just keep that close to my heart and my head and try to go on."
"I was just thinking, 'Now, I'd really like to use one or two of [my dogs] in a feature,” he jokes. “I want to be this like, you know, this soccer mom, and really get my dogs out there in the film world."
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