The Running Man

With his unusually intense documentary, Running Stumbled, opening in cinemas across the UK this weekend, director John Maringouin talks to Eye For Film.

Jennie Kermode: How did the idea for Running Stumbled develop? After the other work you've done, why did you choose to make such a personal film?

John Maringouin: I didn't actually choose to make it. I was working on another film and I was intending to just use my family in the ending of that film, but what was there was so powerful that I ended up making this documentary.

JK: So what was the original film going to be about?

JM: I was working on a film that was about a guy that was living in a haunted car, and it was sort of guiding him recklessly down a path towards meeting his family, who are in the script as an incredibly disturbed family, very much based on my own life.

JK: How do you feel that your own close emotional involvement in Running Stumbled affected your approach to it as a director?

JM: I shot it very much as somebody who was making a feature film. A lot of times I just filmed what was going on. It was a combination of forms, and you can see that in the film. Every scene is different, every scene has its own beginning, middle and end. We shot 50 hours of footage and at one point there was a six or seven hour version. It was an ongoing process - it lasted three years. It's not the kind of film that you can edit all the time. I think you have to step way very cleary, and then dive back into it.

JK: Do you think that the very personal nature of this film will help audiences to identify with the people involved in it?

JM: I think you can't help as an audience but identify with the film-maker. It's a first person point of view. film - you can't get away from that perspective. The film-maker, you know, is relating to these things personally, so you see it through my eyes; so it's an intensely personal experience for the audience. In a strange way, it ends up being a more personal experience to watch than it was to shoot, because when I was shooting I was so focused on detaching from what was going on and protecting myself from what was going on so that I could actually film it properly.

JK: How does your father feel about being the subject of this film?

JM: I think he welcomed the opportunity to portray himself as the bad guy. Very much so. And I think she [Marie Pennoui, his father's partner] did as well. This was the performance of their lives.

JK: Do you think it will help people to understand the kind of lifestyle that drug use can create?

JM: I think it does provide insight, but it's not about drugs. To me it's about an amazingly intense, dark, destructive and also beautiful relationship, more than it's about drugs. I think you could take the drugs out of the situation completely and have the same movie, because some relationships will do that to you. I know - I've been in them.

JK: How did the experience of working on this film change your relationship wth your father?

JM: It created a relationship with my father, for better or worse. I didn't have the intention of making the father story, about getting to know him or and of that; I can't think of anything more boring than that. So, yeah, any relationship I have with him is a by-product of making a film about the two of them.

JK: Do the two of you share a professional understanding, with your film-making and your father's art?

JM: Yeah, I think so. I think that's really where we relate, as artists.

JK: It was interesting seeing the film set just before the flood in New Orleans. What happened to your father and Marie when the flood hit?

JM: They, like most people in New Orleans who lost homes, are still living in trailers. Which, ironically in their case, turned out to be a better place to live. It's not a film about New Orleans - I think it could really have been set anywhere - but while we were filming it there was always the possibility of a flood lurking in the background.

JK: What would you like viewers to take away from this film?

JM: It's a film about the kind of people we like to think we don't resemble. We might not like to think about it in America here and now but these are exactly the kind of characters that Tennesee Williams was writing about back in the Fifties. If Jerry Springer had been around back then, we would have seen all those people - Blanche DuBois and the Kowalski family - up there on his show. And they still exist. We see little snippets of these people's lives on shows like Jerry Springer and then they disappear again and we never get to know them. We don't get to see that they're real people. We don't get to see the way they live their lives. Running Stumbled is a very intense film which shows them as they really are.

For more information about the film, visit the official site.