Laura Dunn at the 2007 Sundance film festival
(Credit: Clayton Chase/WireImage.com)
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Her first full-length documentary, “The Unforeseen,” lives up to its prestigious pedigree. Dunn displays a Malick-ian eye for poetic visuals in her environmentally conscious portrait of the toll land development has taken on Barton Springs, a natural oasis in Austin, Texas.
The film received rave reviews at the 2007 Sundance film festival and recently scored the “IFC Truer than Fiction” prize at Film Independent’s Spirit awards. Dunn is no stranger to accolades—she received a silver medal at the Student Academy Awards for her documentary short, "Green"—but the IFC prize comes with the added bonus of a $25,000 grant towards her next film.
Metromix spoke with the young filmmaker on the phone from her Austin home about what that next project may be, how Barton Springs is faring now and what it’s like to interview Robert Redford while pregnant. All the while her son Jasper could be heard making various happy noises in the background.
Is it true that Terrence Malick approached you about making this film?
Yeah. I was fresh out of film school [at University of Texas, Austin] and was on my way to Israel. I’d gotten some grant money and was going to do a project about water over there, but there was a lot of violence going on and I’d suspended my trip temporarily. During that time, [Malick] and some mutual friends had discussed the idea of making a film on that subject.
He’d been living in Austin for awhile, correct?
Yeah, he’d been living there for 40 years or so. He’s lived in other places too, but it had been a home of his since high school. Terry had lots of ideas and was certainly very inspiring, but at the same time, he wanted me to take full responsibility for the film.
That’s kind of a daunting task.
It is. And I was very daunted. But he was a tremendous mentor throughout the project. Through the origin of the film and a lot of the initial shaping, I’d cite him, although he might not want to be cited. [Laughs]
In college, you did some work on the other side of the camera. What drew you into documentary film work?
I was at Yale for my undergrad and I interested in doing theater and was involved quite a bit with that in college. Basically, I was a kid from the South who was suddenly transplanted to New Haven, Conn. I don’t know if you know much about New Haven…
I know nothing about it.
It’s one of the poorest cities in the nation. It has the highest number of babies born addicted to crack.
That’s a dubious honor.
It’s a hardcore craze. You have all this urban poverty, and there’s Yale right in the middle of it. I was a student worker in the dining hall and did that to pay my way in college. I was actually a de facto employee of the student union, so when a strike broke out on campus I became interested in it. I went to some meetings and started digging around. It was really disturbing how they were articulating what I was already experiencing. What I’d call a cognitive dissonance—the discrepancies between the rhetoric of the university and the reality of how they treated the community right around it.
From there, it was just a process of me finding a friend of mine who’d made films, and saying to him “Let’s do some interviews with people.” I always describe that project as the process of me trying to make sense of my education. Not necessarily embarking on a film career.
Is Barton Springs a place people still go to often these days?
Oh yeah. It’s wintertime right now—a lot of people do swim during the winter, but I haven’t been so brave. I know people who say that Barton Springs is dead. To them, the water doesn’t have the same clarity and life that it had just ten years ago. There’s not a lot of fish, and it doesn’t look like the Caribbean anymore. It still depends on the weather patterns. If it rains a lot, there’s a lot of runoff and the water will become very murky. The springs were closed a lot last summer because we had record rainfall. Unfortunately, the springs have been closed more often every year. They’re still here but they’re fragile.
One of the main characters in the film is developer Gary Bradley. How did you come to choose him as your focal point?
I’m someone who’s interested in environmental issues and all that, so it would have been very easy for me just to get interviews from environmentalists. I felt it was important to immerse myself in the world of developers as well, just to deepen my perspective and make a more interesting film.
I’d heard a lot about Gary Bradley…he had been arguably the most vilified developer over the years of the Austin growth wars. He was very reluctant to talk to the media. Through some people I’d met, I managed to get a meeting with him, and after our first meeting I felt strongly that the whole story was right there. He was just so dramatic and a really powerful character. I admired that and was inspired by it, even if he represented a very different way of seeing the issues.
Green topics are everywhere now, but they always end on the conclusion that there’s more to be done. Do you have your eye on anything, in terms of upcoming documentary work?
I’m not totally sure. I haven’t really had the time to form an idea. I’ve been looking at agriculture and the problems inherent in large-scale corporate agriculture vs. small-scale organic farming. But I don’t really know what the story is, at this point.
How old is your son?
He’s two and a half. He was born smack-dab in the middle of this film. Which [laughs] made it all the more challenging. When I interviewed Robert Redford for the film, it was on my due date.
On your due date?
Yeah. I was nine months pregnant and counting. I went into labor the next day. When I look back on it, it’s pretty funny. I can imagine that being interviewed by a very pregnant lady could be pretty disarming.
