Director's Statement
It is a challenge to make an informational film that doesn’t make people want to put their heads down on the desk and take a nap. This is especially true when your topic is timeless—not ripped from the headlines. We had to get away from the golden rule of educational film and most topical documentary—that everything has to be clearly understandable in real time on the first viewing. Instead, to get neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, to resonate with enough meaning to cause audiences to make connections themselves and be involved, we decided to juxtapose ambiguous, metaphorical imagery against a candid informational narrative. Our hope is that there is an arc created between these two layers.
What made the structure of this film a real puzzle was the number of different types of elements being woven together. There is the telling of personal stories by about a dozen featured individuals. In some cases their stories include kind of surreal re-enactment of some traumatic incident. There are whole scenes that are visual metaphors for the content being discussed at the time. And then we have the narration. The opportunities to juxtapose these elements have allowed us to see ways of unleashing meaning we didn’t know existed. Another challenge came from a desire to avoid the disembodied quality of a voice over without taking up the entire cinema screen with a narrator just standing there talking. The solution was to give me, as narrator, a small hand-held camera to create a small image of me we could superimpose over the more meaningful activities of each scene. And there’s time I spend on screen in my boxer shorts trying, again, to create another channel to the meaning. This came out of a pilot we did when we realized we had to find a way to address the audience as starkly as possible. I hope we’ve ended up with a film that doesn’t seem like it came from a formula—even a modified formula. We’re excited about what we have now.
I’m influenced by a lot of different sources from painting, music and film. I’d like to build on work such as that of Desmond Morris—with his images of naked people walking through a shopping malls, etc. Also, James Burke’s series “Connections” and another BBC program, “The Secret Life of Machines”—if you haven’t seen that one, do. It’s brilliant. — Lee Boot 6/05/07
Lee Boot
Lee Boot’s (Writer/Director/Narrator) video and internet works have been broadcast and exhibited nationally and internationally in a number of venues including Public Television, the Johannesburg Biennial in South Africa, London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum. Boot left his sixteen-year career as a school teacher career in 2000 (a career that earned him a Distinguished Teacher Award from the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars) to work toward using film as a way to help make powerful and profound information part of our culture. Euphoria is the first major project that is part of that goal. This is based on the idea that societal norms influence behavior, and that well a informed-culture will promote positive shifts toward healthy and fulfilling living.
Background
Classroom teacher and video artist Lee Boot realized that the underlying issue determining his students’ success or failure was the way they handled general life issues. Often, they didn’t seem to understand much about how human beings work. So he began to make video art, about how brains really learn and why only certain kinds of intelligences get a fair shake in school. He showed them to his students and observed that they were engaged—much more so than when watching more typical educational or “mental hygiene” films they were accustomed to seeing in school. Even the science content became interesting to them because they liked learning about themselves, especially when the attitude was different and unexpected.
In 1997, Boot attended a convention sponsored by the Society For Neuroscience where he pitched his idea of making videos that would help students understand themselves and address what they cared about most: finding a way to be happy and successful. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), troubled by unsuccessful media campaigns to keep kids off drugs, saw Boot’s ideas as an new opportunity and encouraged him to write a grant to fund this vision of making media that talked to kids about their lives instead of trying to scare them with the well-known horrors of drug use.