VINTERVIEW: Director Chris McGilvray talks Wine Documentary EDEN (2024)

Today’s VINTERVIEW is with filmmaker, branded content creator, and now documentarian Chris McGilvray.

We chat with Chris about his narrative short filmmaking, how he quickly realized this was never going to lead to the kind of breakthrough previous generations enjoyed, pivoted to branded content and became a champion of pushing that type of work into more organic and authentic expressions, and then segued from that into his first feature length documentary about the Mount Eden Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, considered to have the longest lineage of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in all of North America.

We thought this Vinterview would run 20-30 minutes. We had the whole thing Q&A’d scripted out and it was only 5 Q’s! But the conversation evolved organically and we talked at length about the themes of the documentary, themes you rarely see in a Wine doc yet pertain to nearly every aspect of the wine industry.

Chris' Short Films:

• The Silence
• Damage
• Out of Nowhere
• Terroir

Transcript

0:00

What price wine? Like the phrase, what price victory? Today's Vinterview is with the director of a documentary that asks us, what price wine? We celebrate the sacrifices that winemaker and vineyard owners make in pursuit of what they say is their passion, but what about their lives outside of wine? What about their families? We went into this interview expecting it to be maybe 20 to 30 minutes in length. Instead, we chatted in depth about the themes of this extraordinary wine documentary that took seven years to film. We had to cut ourselves off to keep it a mere hour. And then the director, Chris McIlvery, he will be joining us for a full length wine and movie pairing episode about the Western to end all Westerns once upon a time in the West. That episode should drop maybe a day or two after this one. So we hope you enjoy this interview. We hope you check out Chris's documentary Eden from 2024. It's streaming on Plex, I believe, in the States. So go see if you can find that and you can rent it on both Apple and YouTube. And we hope you join us in two days for the Once Upon a Time in the West episode with Chris. Let's get this rolling. You not entertained? Will Dave and I'm Dallas and this is Ventertainment. We have opinions on just about everything. Sometimes those opinions are spot on. Sometimes they go down easier with a glass of wine. This is entertainment. The wine. Preparing Podcast. Welcome everyone to Vint- Entertainment, the podcast where we pair wine with entertainment. It is as simple as that. And today we have a very special guest with us, Chris McIlvray. First we'll be discussing with us what is arguably the Western to end all Westerns, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinal, and James Robards. And he and we will, of course, pair wines with that indisputable classic. So make sure to listen to that episode right after this one. But for now, let's learn everything about Chris and why he's here on this podcast all about wine and movie pairing. So Christopher McGilvray is an award winning independent filmmaker based in Santa Cruz, California. His feature film Eden premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival in 2024, winning the Audience Award. It is currently distributed by Gravitas Ventures in North America and continues to engage audiences through experiential screening events, which we know all about. We got our first experiential screening event coming up in June. We'll hear all about that at the end of this episode in the housekeeping. But for now, continuing with Chris, he studied film at the University of Southern California and linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directly out of college. He worked as an associate producer for Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker David Hoffman. His directorial debut, The Silence, took home awards for Best Short Film Editing and Best Western at the Action on Film Festival in 2009. His subsequent short films screened across the country at various film festivals, and in 2010 he began working full-time as a branded content filmmaker. His current company, Nomadic Bear Productions, has produced branded content for a wide variety of companies and organizations, including Ridge Vineyards, Oracle, EMI Records, and Mayor of Oakland, Liddy Staffs Oakland Promise. Chris, welcome to the interview segment of the entertainment, Vinterview segment, as it were. I'm holding for the applause on that one. Bravo! You do them today man and you know can't wait to hear all about your film work and especially the Eden documentary but are you ready? I am ready, After a fun, long intro like that, it's always weird when somebody reads your bio. It's such a weird intro. I'm like, oh, wow, are those all the things that you did in your one little paragraph? Right right oh It's way too much it's way too much um We had another guy on one time and like I got to like the eight bullet point and I was like, fuck you like picks pick three This is just a little intro. Let's get into the actual talk. Yeah, speaking of that so ah Chris welcome again, let's start with talking about your own Western by the way Bravo I'm making a goddamn Western. We don't get enough of those. I have one in the can myself I've written and God knows if it will ever see the light of day But I love the format love the genre and we need to see more Westerns Yeah, your very first short film was the silence the log line reads ah In the fading days of the Western frontier, a group of outlaws journeyed through the desert in search of another score. As isolation and futility turned the posse upon itself, the leader works to prevent an all-out bloodbath. So, tell us about how you came to make this film. What were the key inspirations? Well, you know, what was what was the process? What was the the the issue because I'm sure every filmmaker has a singular issue that if they could go back and change that one thing, right? Just the one man. Just the one. Oh, the silence. was, God, that was almost 20 years ago. And so it's fun. like, know, it's okay. I don't mind aging. Doesn't bother me that much. It's one of the things I like about wine, right? It gets better with age. So I like to maybe think I do that too. I don't know. So I always loved Westerns. Westerns were something that I got really, really excited about at a relatively young age because they just have this cool sense of mixing like American mythology and really, really strong iconography. And one of the first things I happened to love about cinema was the imagery side of it. know, like even from a young age, there were always those images that would sort of stick with me when I saw a film that I absolutely loved. And that was the thing that I remembered probably even more than, you know, the story or particular lines. would always have these images burned. the back of my head. So I always loved sort of the iconography of Westerns. And, uh you know, this was in my early 20s when I decided to make this movie and actually made it with my older brother. Daniel was the only film we ever made together. um And, you know, basically he, you know, sort of took on more of the producing. I took on more of the directing from a script that I wrote, but we definitely shared both both hats there. And at the time I was really starting to get really interested in lot of European cinema. And so I had had this love for Westerns and, in particular, I love Sergio Leone Westerns, which is something we'll obviously get into a little later here. And I was sort of marrying it with my like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky phase, you know, my existential crisis phase, right? Lots of reflection. Right. And I was like, dude, what happens if you like basically took like uh John Ford or Sergio Leone style Western and put those characters in Central Crisis movie? um So that was our hope. That was what we were going for uh with the silence. And, you know, as you can imagine, I'm not going to pretend that the script was the most logical. uh I mean, one of the first starting points that we had as a challenge is we had like no money. And so we couldn't even afford horses. And so, you know, when you don't have horses in a Western, it's like literally it's characters just wandering around aimlessly through the desert. And so it's like right off the bat, we're in sort of you know, absurdist world right there because oh You got the Bergman thing going on, know, it's slightly heightened reality. Yeah. Yeah Totally. It's heighten reality. But the thing that, you know, I think really holds up with it is a lot of the like fun iconography, like, you know, especially with when I think of Sergio Leone, we all think of the showdowns, right? And one of the things that's really cool about the showdowns from like a filmmaking standpoint is that he's actually much less interested in the actual violence. It's the buildup. and the tension building and all of the, you know, everybody preparing for that actual moment. So I knew we wanted to like end with this cool showdown. And then we also wanted to have, you know, there's this character we literally just named everybody like, you know, there's the leader, there's the kid, there's, you know, the leaders like, you know, right hand man who's the drunk, who's basically just the, you know, the drunk alcoholic who basically has like a moment of um You know, sort of has an epiphany and realizes that his life is wasted and he gets a nice, you know, monologue about how he's essentially wasted his life by, you know, going around and being a hired gun and doing nothing meaningful. um That's kind of the Bergman, you know, Tarkovsky stuff. And then at the end, it very much ends with, you know, sort of Leoni style Western showdown. And it was just such a fun. project to get to do and you know, we actually, you know, got to play at some, you know, regional smaller festivals because it was like, like you were saying in the beginning, Talis, almost nobody makes Westerns, especially at this point. This was, you know, like 2005, 2006, that kind of thing. It was just sort of a, you know, it was somewhat of a dormant genre. down. Well, I people struggle with it, especially in festivals where genre is so key, like what genre are you? Is so key to where they're programming you or whether you even fit within what the festival is looking for. like a Western, is it a drama? Is it action? Is it a thriller? And it's kind of it's like, yes. The answer, you know, and so. of all of those boxes totally. It does. Yeah. But then it doesn't fit, you know, exactly into any of those things. And so I can imagine a western short being especially like, could fit anywhere, but you also you're easily rejected from being a natural fit from just about anywhere, is. Oh, yeah. Real quick, do you remember what camera you guys shot on? Yeah, totally. Canon XL one. So, yeah, we are talking, you know, what is that guy? He is the um it's mini DV, right? Standard definition mini DV. And it's like and we have an HD cam of it um showed it on, you know, a massive screen in um Oklahoma. We got to go to this. uh small film festival in Duncan, Oklahoma called Trail Dance because they love Westerns as you could imagine. And they had an enormous, enormous screen. It actually surprisingly held up pretty well for standard, deaf, you know, 480p. Yeah. Yeah. man. was the same camera they shot 28 days later. Right. Yep. It's that camera. Yeah. Yeah. Fix lenses and everything like. just the one fixed zoom like we tried to do like one rack focus and I had to put the characters like 75 feet apart to be able to have a rack focus you know it was pretty f***ing yeah like there's no such thing as shallow depth of field with those lenses There was that one shot which actually was well done you had the two guys standing I guess it like it's probably like 35 degrees in the background of a carrot in the foreground stagger to kind of add some depth of solid that was very solid job Thanks man, I appreciate it. Thank you. That was a fun project. One of the things I also learned from that one is that I had a very weird and sort of absurd sense of humor that didn't necessarily translate in the way that I thought it would, you know? And it's like, when I wrote that script, I thought a lot of it was really funny. And then watching audience reactions, people didn't. dead somber everyone was taking a dead somber yeah Yeah, sometimes that humor is only in your mind's eye and then you gotta like manipulate the hell out of it to get it on screen, which you know, that's the idea. Yeah, I learned a lot from that one. Yeah, I think humor you start to realize why humor is so broad most of the time is because people don't understand you're doing humor if you're not Heligraphing like Comedie del Arte type things where it's like this is why we do the face and the gestures and it's like because now you know you're watching a comedy and so now everything can be funny, but if you don't tell people it's a comedy they're like, huh? Yeah, so yeah. Yeah It's so true. And it's funny, it's like Sergio Leone, he's so good at that. He's so good at the Comedia dell'arte. Like, it's why my nine-year-old daughter loves watching these movies, because the facial expressions are so over the top. So much of it is those extreme close-ups of just the face. And it is, it's like telegraphing to such an extreme amount, which is a really fun thing to do. So for your shorts on that note, I actually wanted to ask you because you've made not just the silence, but you've made a number of shorts throughout your career. are they, do you have plans to make them available in any way, or form? Or I tried to search for them. I could not find the shirts themselves, only the shorts. Where, what's the status of all of that with you writing? You know, that's a great question because like I made them and they were mostly part of my, you know, artistic development, you know, and yeah, it was part of my real like initially I wanted to be a narrative filmmaker. That was my dream. And I mean, you know, truthfully, like, do I think that I still have a feature like, you know, Western in me? I think I do at some point, but I've really become a documentary based filmmaker. And so it sort of lies outside of my brand, which is part of that. So it's like they're kind of in a nowhere land. I show them to friends. They're all on Vimeo. um But it's not something that I'm like heavily leveraging right now because it doesn't. It's very it's like my student work, you know, it's like all stuff that I. I worked on to develop into the filmmaker that I've become, but I don't see it as part of like my traditional, you know, brand and repertoire. It's not necessarily with Nomadic Bear Productions. You know, it's interesting. um Another filmmaker I met recently, the DTLA Art Walk, if you don't know, we are in the process of putting together this uh wine cellar cinema. uh And so we are sort of sourcing uh short filmmakers. And uh two of the filmmakers that came across are currently in the documentary space and did lots of narrative shorts. And they kind of have the exact same perspective as you do, they it's not necessarily something they're interested in putting a whole lot of energy behind at the moment, I guess, because they brand it themselves, in part. em But I'm curious about that, because you're you are the third person I've heard this sort of this angle about that from in a while. Well, that note, one of the reasons a lot of filmmakers are, you know, they've done their shorts, they might have a feature in their future, they would love to make a career out of narrative filmmaking and things of that nature. you found that the pathway was not so easy by trying to go with these shorts. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because we are we know a lot of filmmakers that feel exactly the same way where there is. the pathway that used to exist, kind of the pathway we grew up believing existed. Starting in the 2010s, like roughly when you were starting, it of, it vanished. And you can still make shorts, you can get in festivals, they'll screen at festivals. That's about it. That's about it. Like, have the magical ride where you like premiere at Sundance and play all your cards right and everything is great, it's very, very challenging to be able to get to that next step, to be able to, you know, get a talent manager, to be able to get signed, to be able to get someone to take a look at your feature length script and... Yeah, that's actually a really interesting conversation. Also just about documentaries in general. Documentaries are going through this tremendous financial crisis because it's actually sort of a similar model where, you know, a documentary is largely produced in an independent space. And then it is, you know, brought to film festivals where it receives awards and accolade with the hopes of being able to attract, you know. distributors, right? That's the standard model right there. One of the things that that model is broken because, partially because the kind of films that festivals are looking to program in terms of documentaries tend to be, you know, very strong, intense social issue documentaries that are really hard to watch and really, really important stories that really, really need to be supported. And we all need to get out there, but when a distributor takes a look at that, they realize that the number of eyeballs that they're ever going to be able to drive to actually watch it is very, very small because especially in a modern world that we're all living in, at the end of the day, do you really want to like watch the movie that's going to make you feel terrible about yourself as a person when literally you're experiencing that feeling all the time while you're reading the news throughout the day. You know, people like sort of escapist content. so I think that's one of the things the documentaries are trying to figure out is how to find a balance between making essential stories, exploring stories that haven't been heard before and perspectives that haven't been explored while at the same time making it entertaining. Because that's one of the things that narrative films just as an industry tended at least have more of an emphasis on is you got. Point for much of it now even yeah, I mean these solitary point and soul point of much of it now, you yeah That becomes a problem in and of itself. But I mean, you know, with my actual shorts, I struggled to be able to get in to break into festivals a lot of the time. You know, I think it took me a long time to realize and I probably didn't even realize this until after I was done making shorts that a short is really nothing like a feature. think most people start by thinking like, I'm going to make a short film. that is the like has to have a three act structure. It's just a shortened version of what my feature is going to be. And that's, that's really not what the form of a short should be. Yeah. In and out super quick. Give it a nice fun little twist. Give them something at the end to, either make them think, make them laugh, And then you're out, dude. That's the form of a short. And I never figured out how It's a tasting menu rather than a 12 course dinner. Totally. Yeah, but it's meant to be its own thing and standalone just like short stories like in prose format versus a novel and short stories are not meant to be chapter one they're not or even a You know a very reduced version like you're like I'll expand this into a novel someday but for now and I think a lot of filmmakers that's the problem is they want to make proof of concepts and so you wind up with just a shrunk down version of Something that you really want to make which is going to be your 90 minute version And it can work okay as a short but yeah, the best shorts are the ones where it's like they exist for their own purpose and Standalone in that way. Yeah That's always the best advice I have to people that are going to be making a short and it's it's hard to like train your brain to think that way. I actually think short stories um translate better to feature films a lot of the time than a novel does because the timeline of a novel is so like, dude, I'm never going to make war and peace into a film. There's been what? Ten generations of an anomaly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. it's not happening, bro. It's not happening. Yeah. Well, I know, you know, there was a we know producer had hope who was like, gee, old school producer, 150 films under his belt, been producing since the 90s. And he essentially stopped producing indie films because he can't make a living doing it anymore. His wife just did a documentary and they're pushing it for all it's worth. But he's basically been a big champion of, you know, we've got to find another way. We've got to find like pathways. because it's like if I can't make a true blue living with my resume, it's like, don't know how any of you are making a living, you know, doing anything out there. And so we've got to do something else. And streamers, can't pay. And everything's more expensive to make, right? So on the one hand, no single platform can get enough eyeballs on your thing, can make enough money off of it. Yet to make it just keeps getting more and more expensive in the first place. So that dissonance is also kind of one of the biggest hurdles to all of this is we need more money in order to make these things and yet no one can give us more money to make these things. Yeah, like Coppola famously said, you know, a couple of years ago, he's like, look, the next generation of filmmakers, they're all going to be doing this as a side hustle for they're going to like basically have your job. And you've got to find a job that doesn't have, you know, doesn't tax your, you know, personal and intellectual space so much that you can't make movies on the side because you can't it's just almost impossible to make cinematic art and make money doing it, so... I like that Coppola said that he's a guy who like renovated a uh hotel while he was filming Megalopolis like he found a second job and like you know made it come into being just so he could have a second job while he was still on his office. um post audio facility. Hotel into this thing totally. Amazing. So are those video links for your shorts? Are they like are they listed or are they private? Like can people buy? I can put him, yeah I'll send him to you guys. Perfect, set him to us and we'll share him. Yeah. Now would you be funny? It's fun for people to see that work because it's very different than what I do, you know, now. uh As I started this conversation with, it's very different than what Nomadic Bear became, because like what happened was that I made all of these short films and, you know, sort of developed my voice and they're mostly, you know, different genres, but very, very visual. That was always sort of a my emphasis. also learned I'm not a writer. I was one of the things I figured out because I wrote all those things myself and I'm like, yeah, I don't know, Screenwriting, not my strong suit. But, you know, in 2010, I, you know, met another friend who's a filmmaker who's a little bit older than me. And he had been in the tech industry for about, you know, 15 or 20 years and was getting sick of it and looking to be able to pivot to be able to make, you know, sort of corporate video communications. And so he came, we met and had this idea of being able to make these sort of cinematic branded documentaries for different companies. And so we initially started in the tech industry, did some recruitment videos and that kind of thing. And I'd never even thought about documentaries. was like, I didn't. really watched that many documentaries because I was a hardcore filmic language guy. I'm a very classic, like, you know, really, really into the auteur theory and the European masters and the Asian masters and then the American, all that kind of stuff. Right. And so I started doing it, you know, because they would pay me. And it was really interesting because I found one of the things I initially found was that like that problem that I had about being able to sit down with a blank page and write a script went away because I was working with a story that actually exists, other individual stories and helping them sort of take their personal narrative and actually elevate it to a higher theme by juxtaposing it with other narratives and other people's individual narratives to be able to make you know, something that hopefully is more relevant to, you know, people who don't even know anything about your industry, who don't care about your product. And the other thing that I loved is being able to walk into a living, breathing actual scene and consider it in a cinematic way of how we're going to actually capture all this stuff. largely shoot a lot of B-roll when you're doing, you know, a documentary. But that's actually the visual language of your film. You you largely have like an interview that, you know, it's just a talking head, but seeing the talking head is not very compelling. And so instead you have to think about how to instantly make a cinematic sequence out of something that you don't have control over that's just happening in front of you. So you're like, all right, if I can capture, you know, closeups from this perspective and then. pull back and get the wide shot here and, you know, do a little bit of slow motion here, that kind of thing. You get all of these pieces that then in the edit, you get to sort of be able to construct an entire piece of film out of. it's like, it's a little bit more of a like intuitive thing versus a completely, you know, David Fincher style, complete control of the world. myself and my department heads dream of every single aspect and make complete control of like, you know, how that napkin is placed, you know, 50 feet from the camera on the back right there. Yeah. Well, I noticed in the the Eden documentary too, especially having just watched Once Upon a Time in the West, and then I went and watched the Eden documentary, you did a thing that you don't see that often in documentaries, but you used it not sparingly either, but the you would have your your talking heads, your your subjects, you would actually capture and keep in the movie the silences and their hesitations. And they're just like watching their face try to work through something and figure out how they wanted to put it into words and stumble over the words and then no stop and maybe go back and try it again. And that's not something a lot of the times those are the takes that don't get used in the documentary. You know, they just they wipe all that out. And I really appreciated that the themes of the documentary come through so much more strongly in terms of what the struggles of these people were, and especially as a family, because like they were they were dedicated. They were tight knit and yet they were struggling in a lot of like each individual in their own separate way. And uh the documentary is very good at making them more not just subjects of a documentary, but human in that way where you don't documentaries rarely have characters in that way. But then you let those moments breathe. And it felt very coming off of one spot a time in the West. like, wow, these are the closeups of the face and the face is just working and you're just like. leaving the camera on it and being like, you could, you'll say something when you say something. Let's just, let's just hold this here for a minute. Yeah. That is kind of the magic of like a skilled documentarian, by the way, knowing to just let the fucking camera roll and run and people will reveal themselves. like you were saying, Chris, you have all that later to kind of piece together. Because I imagine sometimes you don't even see the magic you're getting on set because it is, you long form. You're recording for a year, two years, whatever it is. Yep. uh That is, uh Dave's point, to grieve everything he said, that is kind of the magic of this doc. um And another thing I think which is beautiful about uh Eden is since we're all, we're currently into the Eden portion. We're there. We're in the Eden portion now. um I think one thing that you often don't find in documentaries is this sort of... full circle relationship moments, right? Because what you end up doing with the parentage of the vineyard of the vintage of the winery um between the couple and how they started, um and then ultimately showcasing how different they are, those two individuals are just completely different people. And We don't necessarily know that until the halfway point when the sun sort of brings it up and essentially says they're completely different people. They should not be together. They just should not be together. Nothing about it works on paper. And another thing you do so well is m in the doc is without saying it, you highlight this sort of dissonance between the father and the son. And uh Seeing that son sort of create this surrogate father relationship with the I forget his name the uh Andreas um was stroke a genius bringing that in and softening that sort of relationship and and sort of illustrating like well He has had some softer people in his life to kind of just guide him and nudge him in the right direction and not this Alpha kind of concept of a father that's driving and really stoic um So it's just a fantastic kind of chronicle of this uh family and this vineyard and job well done, man. Looks great. Great shots, great narrative, great weaving, all of it, great editing, all of it. Good stuff. I mean, thank you guys so much. it's like, I mean, yeah, you guys hit on so many points there that Yeah, we do that. We tend to overwhelm, so sorry. Go. You know, I'm a big fan of slow cinema and in particular in as the movement of cinema, especially popular cinema has moved more towards a more manic, hectic, know, cuttier, especially as we're getting more influenced by YouTube film. um more intense experience. There's this whole other movement that's the counter movement to that, which is slow cinema led by like, you know, the Hungarian filmmaker Bellatar. I don't know if you guys have ever seen a Bellatar film, like Satsang Tango is literally a six and a half hour movie and they purposefully chose to hold on any individual shot way longer than anybody, including themselves. is comfortable with. I mean, we're talking like, have like 15 minute tracking shots of characters trudging through the mud. and even the we're talking about today like you know another they hold on some shots there man Once upon a time like that is not in a hurry man. No, it'll it really Sergio Leone is not in a hurry and it's like so and I think that that is one of the curses of a lot of modern filmmaking is the people are so Nervous about losing audience attention and retention that they like are Just jumping the gun all the time And one of the best things that you learn from watching, especially classic movies, is take your time. And if it's an interesting enough scenario and interesting enough character, it's always going to be compelling. And so like when I think of like Reed in our film, Eden, who's the son, Reed is one of the most internal people I have ever encountered in my entire life. Absolutely fascinating. but it's very hard for him to find the words to be able to express himself. And so by nature, in order to really do him justice and turn him into a character, which is another thing you brought up, Dave. For me, if I put somebody on film, I come from the old narrative world where it's like, you don't take two characters that could have been one. You eliminate one. and then you make it just one character. So if somebody's gonna be in a film, that you should know who they are as a person and give them the screen time to develop them into a character. can't stand when you have to have a lower third to be able to tell you who this person speaking is and give them justification for their opinion. And so many documentaries are made of like, literally getting as many celebrities as you possibly can to be able to talk about why this person matters and everybody gets their five second sound bite. This is the exact opposite of that. It's like I wanted to really spend time with these people and they're pretty normal, regular people that happen to make something that's extremely well received and well made, but they're very normal, regular people. so my favorite moments from that film are always those moments where somebody like Reed is sitting there contemplating what the significance of growing up on Mount Eden is stated, right? Yeah Right. An isolated mountaintop. Right, right. And actually, right before we keep talking about this, I just realized we should tell people what this documentary is real briefly, because we haven't actually said it in audio at this point. I'm sure people can read the description of this episode. But this is Eden released in 2024 about the Mount Eden Vineyard and Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, considered to have the longest lineage of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in all of North America. So that is the documentary, the family that runs the Eden Winery. That is what this movie chronicles. And so Reed is the son. And one of the things, it's a great theme that we discover where the parents, before they had kids, it's one thing for them to decide, ooh, like a nice rural away from everybody, home and vineyard up on a mountaintop. But then you have kids. And the next generation are like one of the, at one point in the documentary, the kids are like, we had to learn how to negotiate. them taking us down to see our friends because the friends would never come up to us because we were the only thing up on this bloody mountain. know, it's like civilization was down there. And so they struggled to love the winery and the vineyard as much as their parents did. And they struggled with their own relationship with it. That's something the documentary, I think, explores. beautifully actually before anyone else says anything else one quick thing Dallas make sure to center yourself on the camera there you keep disappearing every time you start talking so you're still disappearing you're still disappearing it's such awkward social media clips when like the person's talking and they're- the talking is like doing this That's all you see of me is like half a face. All the- B-roll, b-roll, you know? Just throw some b-roll over it, nobody wants to see you talking about Exactly. On the question of B-roll, you had clips throughout this documentary of the main two parents, the husband and wife duo that run this winery. You have them at all sorts of ages. Were they sitting on some footage from when they were younger? What was the span of time? Yeah, so it's seven years and it wasn't intended to be that, you know. It's obviously, as you can imagine, a pretty epic and long story. I'll try and tell it in a somewhat concise manner. So in 2014, towards the end of it, I got hired by the Santa Cruz Mountain Wine Growers Association to be able to make a promotional film of, you know, sort of tracking the 2015 vintage. with four separate wineries. Those wineries were Ridge Vineyards, Mount Eden, excuse me, Thomas Fogarty and stores. And at the time, I'd done a lot of work in agriculture. I really loved filming craft, that kind of thing. But I didn't know anything about wine. I drank wine, thought it was cool, was not intellectually engaged in any way, or form. And I was super excited about this because I love the Santa Cruz Mountains. That's, you know, my home region for you know, wine. And so I was like, all right, it sounds cool. And so we get to spend that entire vintage of 2015 tracking it and doing these interviews. And I got to learn about winemaking from some of the best and coolest winemakers out there, like Paul Draper from Ridge Vineyards and Jeffrey Patterson from Mount Eden and Nathan Candler, you know, Thomas Fogarty and, you know, John Olney and all of these really, really Amazing people. One of the things that was fun for me is that a lot of it was spending time in the vineyards and actually, you know, sort of documenting the experience of the amazing amount of labor that actually goes into producing these wines. And so I fell in love with the vineyards even more before I fell in love with the wine. And then once you get the intellectual bug with wine, then it gets really interesting. So one way to put it. You're going back once that hits. Still going back, man. Still going. It's sort of an endless cycle, you know, until my bank account runs out. Oh, shit. my goodness, oh our wine for this podcast and let me tell you there are there's no amount of patreon that can keep up with us it's a problem it is definitely an expensive intellectual habit. It's not like, you know, just watching movies. Literally, you watch movies, you used to be able to rent them, you know, that kind of thing. It's not that expensive. Well, in streaming nowadays, have a streaming service and you've got like thousands at your fingertips and just just touch scotch month to month and then you've got more thousands at your fingertips. It's, know, a really fun fact about back in the heyday of DVDs at the peak of DVD sales and releases, which I think was 2006, there were roughly 30,000 feature films released on DVD at that point in time and. In total. like all you had to choose from was 30,000 exactly and right now in 20 I don't see this is the thing we I try to bring this up for people that are like physical media whatever happened to that I'm like guys it wasn't as good as you remember like there was so much not available to us or it was only you know the butchered version in your country that was re-edited and redone and then you had to like search out the French DVD that didn't have subtitles and Yeah, for the for the like it wasn't as good as we remember but now in 2026 on any given day there are over 250,000 things to stream. compared to what it was at the peak of physical media. And let's be fair, that's way too many damn it. Let's go back to old analog times. We don't need all that option, all those options. Totally. Yeah. Well, pros and cons. you know, there's, there's always those. man. Um, so anyway, I start, you know, I worked on that in 2015 and so I got really interested in wine and I fell in love with Mount Eden because, know, when I went to Mount Eden for anybody that has never been, which is most of you, because it's not a very easily accessible winery. You know, in 2015, they didn't even have a tasting room, man, which I thought was fascinating. Like what California winery, any size, doesn't have a tasting room. apparently, Apparently back then, like in the 2010s, even Pastor Robles was only just starting to really get his shit together and put tasting rooms everywhere. Like it was a new thought for a lot of places. Yeah, that's probably true. But like you look at like Napa, I mean, it was just it was the thing. Napa and Sonoma, everything was about the tasting room and it was all D to C. It all trying to be able to get you in the wine club and get you to be a lifetime fan. All of that kind of stuff. And, you know, Mowdy never played that that game. They were much more they were sort of based on like a, you know, Burgundian chateau style where it's like you had to get an invitation. in order to be able to go out there. So it feels very magical when you're up there because it's not the hospitality experience. It's a uh dirty, dusty, windy road. It's a vineyard. And then you're like in the vineyard and you can like maybe sit at their front porch and out amongst the vineyard and you know. The true family operation. true family operation. And it also, you know, I grew up in the town next to them, which is Los Gatos, they're in Saratoga. And it made me feel like what I think going to a California winery in the 70s would have felt like because it's somewhat trapped in time. Because it doesn't have that hospitality, that D to C angle. It's There's no bullshit, man. It's basically just, it is what it is. This is our wine and it's an agricultural space. So that I thought was really cool. I loved that it was a family run winery. And so then at the end of 2016, I was looking for a feature length documentary to do and I live pretty close to them. So that made it easy to be able to go out and film all the time. I had kept up my relationship with both Ellie and Jeffrey. and I, you know, I remember I took Ellie to lunch and I was like, Hey, I'm thinking about making a documentary. Um, because the initial thought was to make a film that tracks the 2017 vintage showcase the incredible hard work that goes into being able to produce these wines. There's a lot of people don't know, especially when it's a mountain vineyard. mean, it's done by hand. There's not much mechanization. It's a very dusty, intense, labor-intensive job. And then I also wanted to track the progression of the vines throughout the year. And so we did that. basically we went up and filmed multiple times every single month, basically tracking the labor as well as tracking the progression. And that actually is most of the B-roll imagery that you see of the progression of the vines and everything that happens. And, you know, it was great. It was beautiful. We did some interviews with both Jeffrey and Ellie and a couple, you know, other people uh and took all of that back and started to cut it together. And I realized pretty quick that like we had this like elevated Brandon film, you know, it's like it was beautiful. Yeah. And but it's like it had no human story. And then I realized that when I was looking at the footage, both Jeffrey and Ellie were always brand representatives. They were speaking as the voice of Mount Eden. They weren't speaking as Jeffrey or Ellie Patterson, the individual. I'm like, that's kind of interesting. And then I started thinking about my own career. And mostly what I do is basically interview people as brand representatives and try and humanize it. And so I, you know, felt very comfortable with that and was normal and whatever. But like, as I tried to come up with any kind of structure, was like, why does anybody care? You know, like, this could be a beautiful, like we could do a queen, a Scotsy kind of thing. They could be gorgeous. It would have been, but like, it's not like who cares. so. It's like a tourism video if you don't have something else going on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so just when I'm starting to have that existential crisis of those shit, what is this movie? What am I doing? I get a call from Ellie and she's like, hey, you know, our son Reed has decided to come back. like I had, know, we had talked about Reed a little bit. I knew that he was the next generation. I knew we lived in San Luis Obispo. I had like met him once briefly. Back in 2015, he was there for the harvest. got some footage of him, you know, basically picking that kind of stuff. But, you I never really talked to the guy and she's like, Hey, you're doing the documentary. Why don't you talk to him? I'm like, okay. So we go up and it's pruning and he's just decided to, you know, sort of commit to coming back and sort of working at the winery and taking, taking it on. And so I met him out in the vineyards and you know, we just started talking and it's like. He's just like an open book and like such a fascinating person because he's largely interested in his personal process and his identity and how he makes sort of sense of significance in the world. so like, I'm like, whoa, this is really interesting. So we then go and do an interview with him about a week later. And that is that interview that is one of the key interviews ends up in the film where he's in like his blue sweater. And it has that great moment that Dave was talking about where you hold on it and he's trying to process. The long silence for a documentary. there is that moment, it's one of the first times we see him as like the camera up close and having him talking. And he he like says like three words, pauses for what feels like an eternity. And his eye, you can just see the eyes working and the gears turning in that in his mind. And you're just, and it's just this moment of tension where it's just silence, silence, silence. And then he finally comes back to it with something to say. And that really sets the tone. for where the documentary goes from there. It does. Yeah, it's because that's when it got really interesting. As a filmmaker, that literally is the moment. And that's one of things I like to say about documentaries. I encourage people is like, if you were there, and you got excited about a moment, and you're like, wow, you need to try and recreate that experience for your audience when they actually view it. That's one of the best ways to be able to sort of make a documentary that I think works is that you need to have those actual moments of epiphany that both happened for your characters, but also for you as an artist and for the whole crew that was there. like use that as the structure for the film. Because it's like, it's so many documentarians like get so caught up in. the messaging side of it and then the narrative that they're telling because a lot of the time you're dealing with really, really important issues that are very, very complicated. And I understand that, but I encourage people to always remember that at the end of the day, cinema is based on the human experience and that's what we want to see. And it's like, it's so much more compelling when you're watching somebody be human. That's what allows those long, slow moments to have resonance, I think, is that it's so relatable. You know, we all have those. And it's unpolished. That's what takes it out of being a branded film, too, because this is the first thing that you cut out of a branded film or the moment where somebody's trying to think about what an answer is. You just cut right to the answer. And it's like Again, to be able to tie this back into wine, I think that's also the best way to think about wine and wine tasting and, you know, understanding it is to slow it all down and not get so caught up on, you know, what you've read about this wine, what somebody's told you about it, like just take the time to let the experience overtake you. That day, that time, that glass. Well, in that moment, like, don't worry about the tasting notes. Yeah, don't worry about tasting notes. Don't worry about saying anything like you don't have to have thoughts that you have to vocalize right away. Like just experience it. It's a slow product. It should be a slow experience. you know, much like the documentary itself, like life, you're tasting the wine, but it doesn't have to be the whole point of the moment either. Like socializing, you have that human element. You are still people just sitting there together. The wine's a part of that. but it doesn't always have to be sometimes us wine nerds, get a little too obsessed with like, we're here for the wine. And it's like, let's just talk about that and nothing else. And I'm like, no, talk about those things. You're people, be people beyond just the wine part of it. um One of the tensions in the documentary, I think that happened too. I'm sure this was something that plainly you did not know was coming, but the couple, the husband wife duo too, and the tensions that arose between them as documentary went on. And the fact that one of them seemed to just keep sinking and almost melting into the vineyard, like just disappearing more and more into the work and into this version of identity. Whereas the other one was like, isn't it a shame we become what we do? And we don't, and we don't become. We can't remain more than that. And this becomes something that is. kind of heartbreaking as the documentary goes on and really questions like, again, as wine people, we romanticize the vineyard and the chateau and the winery and the winemaker and the winemaking to a level that then watching this documentary and it's like, yeah, but at what price? know, what is lost if this becomes too much of who we are and what we obsess about? See, I take the other route on that. I see that relationship split up, and I reflect back on the earlier statement of the Sun saying, you know, these two people are just so diametrically opposed. But in that sort of opposition, they built something phenomenal. They did something that perhaps neither one could have done on their own. And I think those tensions lasted for a while, and inevitably they did fray at the edge and sort of, you know... pull apart but we'll be the thing. The one thing I'll say about that, but the reason it's still heartbreaking to me is that one, the partnership predates the winery. So if anything has had more work put into it, it would be that versus what the work that had put into the winery. And the guys like a hop, skipping and jumping away of pretty much having to retire anyway. But he just couldn't do it in time. He to just keep pushing. He's like, no, I can't let go yet. I can't let go yet. To the point where, and again, we were talking about the price of the family, even the kids, and their weird relationship with the winery because of how much living on a mountaintop was not ideal for children. for growing a family and raising a family. And so so much that gets sacrificed just in the name of this thing. And at some point, like some of that sacrifice can be seen as, and I would agree with you on this, like can be seen as like a positive thing. And it's like, yes, but this is look at what they built, look at what they were able to do. And even the kids as they got older start to come back and see some of that value as well. But there is still a but where's the line? At what point do you that usual line where it's like when does it cross over into obsession into like just sure there's nothing I've lost so much of myself except this part of my identity that I don't even know what I'd be if I let this go. Yeah. And that's why her statement is so potent and so powerful, because she's clearly been right next to that in tandem watching it, but also one annoyed by it. Clearly, she's annoyed by it to a certain degree. But also she understands that it is the underpinning of their entire life. And so when she makes that statement saying you are not your reputation, you cannot just be your reputation or paraphrase, I'm sure it's wrong. But whatever it is to that effect. It's a really potent statement. And I like what you guys did in the editing by allowing that to kind of just play uh early on in Act one with no real sort of context. And then, of course, looping back in the end where we get the context of where she get why she said that. um So, yeah, it's. Alice, you're my hero, dude. You're very no, you are the very first person other than Ellie herself that has ever realized that we use the same clip twice and put it in there at the beginning and then give context because the context provide completely changes the statement. I'm not kidding. Nobody has ever. All right. But the reason I think I appreciate it so much is because of what you were saying earlier in that documentaries often end up being a little stilted, a little stale, a little point and click, a little sort of empty. And it's those sort of magical moments of knowing when to take a statement. and placing it early on, then sort of looping back to and creating that sort of, book ends and like you said, giving context. That's the narrative, that's the story. mean, that ultimately, that's the takeaway. The theme of the entire documentary is almost that one statement in that you cannot just be your reputation. And for him, that's all there is. And for her, there's gotta be more. When I would even that really became one of the key themes and explorations of the film is this study of identity. And I would say that this is a cultural thing. I this is like an American situation. It's not specific to wine in any way, because America has a tendency when somebody is working on a product that we all admire. it's there's so much pressure to be able to focus all of your energy into producing that product. And you only have so much energy, so much time, so much identity available to be able to give. And because you're getting so much influence to push all of yourself into that, it, you know, always leads to the question of what are you sacrificing? in order to do it. Work-life balance has always been a problem. It's a terrible problem in the wine industry. mean, so many winemakers that I've interviewed that are amazing winemakers that we all admire have, you know, really challenging personal lives because they've sacrificed so much in order to produce this. The same is true of cinema. There's so many wonderful filmmakers that I love their films. I would never want to be in their family. I would never. Any craft like this, you're right. Any craft like this you find, and like you said, it does seem to be kind of um exacerbated in the American sort of persona with our work culture and hero worship. yeah, everything else has to suffer. Or I shouldn't say has to suffer. It seems as if everything has to suffer when you're chasing this sort of dragon, this muse. Well, we believe in America, you know, we always kind of give shit to the Europeans for like how many vacation, how much vacation time they get in family time and family leave and it's like, but it's so much healthier and we're like, but we're much more productive. And I'm like, and still poor. What good has it done us? Like we're more like, what is, what are we doing? We're still getting beaten by China in the latest technological races. It's levels are in stain. And any job that pays well enough, we demand people essentially live, and eat it. know, it's like if we're At three vacations a year is great, but Europe never gave us anything like the Snuggie, so I'm going to push back on that. I would like to just say that's the truth. There's no clean answer to this because there is a sacrifice for taking a lot of personal time and taking breaks and you know holding a personal part of your identity away from your professional identity. Like I will fundamentally admit I don't have an answer as to you know what the right balance is. It's just that that became the nature of the exploration. I think it's important for people to at least ask themselves that and then also ask that of the people that they admire because it's one of those things, you know, like in the wine industry in particular, one of the big things that kicked this film off for me is how frustrated I get by like, you know, wine marketing because it is so aspirational. It is very lifestyle oriented. It is it. literally made to be able to sort of have you idealize this version of being a vineyard owner, being an estate owner. And that's not the reality. we all, anyone who's worked in it knows that it isn't. But at the same time, it's always the thing that is being encouraged to be sold. And so I purposely wanted to do an exploration of like, well, that's not that's not it. know, Even from a consumer standpoint, it's always like, well, you have to travel to these vineyards to really understand the wine. I'm like, so the world, have to be able to travel the world at all times with our non-existent vacation days and our workloads that never stop. it's like, how, how was anyone even, it's one of the reasons why wine though remains so niche is like people who can afford both the time and the physical ability to do these things. And so we sell that. uh, image and that lifestyle, but it's, just unavailable to so many of us for the most part. Um, but on that note, we are to keep desperately keep this at one hour. Yeah, right. Because we gotta move on. I I noticed. I know. So now we're going to now we are going to move on the definitely go check out Eden the twenty twenty four documentary from Chris McGilvray and in a few days you'll be able to check out our epic conversation with Chris on the trailblazing Sergio Leone Western film once upon a time the West we are about to head off to go record that right now and of course we will be doing some epic wine pairings with that film as well or if you're listening to this well after its original release just jump right on over to the next episode and catch us all there. We will see you there. Ciao for now. guys