LIFE ON THE EDGE

Great Speeches From A Dying World brings new emotion and depth to the problem of homelessness, from a filmmaker who believes there is more to a documentary than journalism.

By Adrian MacDonald

Linas Phillips, finished now with his second feature, continues to build a promising career around documentaries that derive much of their power from the fact that his own life—with its attendant epiphanies and right or wrong turns—is part of the story. Working almost entirely by himself with a hand-held digital camera, Phillips uncovers the course of his own personal journey while recording the nuances of human character in others.

Linas Phillips (right) with Tomey Smith

“As a documentary filmmaker you have an excuse to talk to people,” he says. “The camera either makes people more interested or less interested to talk to you. Obviously everyone who appears in the film was interested.”

In Great Speeches From A Dying World, Phillips appears at first to be presenting a traditional, interview-driven documentary about Seattle’s homeless. But Phillips’ own deepening relationship with his characters becomes a critical part of the narrative.

“I dive in—things are always richer that way,” he says. “The picture becomes a part of my life. My life might not be all that interesting sometimes, but it becomes more interesting and valid because of the picture I’m working on.”

In his critically acclaimed 2006 debut film Walking to Werner, Phillips constructed a poignant narrative from his at-times quixotic journey walking from Seattle to Los Angeles to visit his hero Werner Herzog. Where that film followed the filmmaker’s own internal struggles and exploits on the road, in Great Speeches Phillips says he deliberately worked to keep himself out of the frame as much as possible.

But while rarely appearing on screen, his presence is felt throughout the film. “I never thought I would become friends with someone like this,” Phillips begins in voice-over, interviewing Tomey Smith, the film’s central character. Smith lies on a mat in a homeless shelter, telling Phillips of his teenage years as a juvenile delinquent, and of a later stint in jail where he contracted HIV.

“I was always curious about homeless people, coming from a very naïve place,” Phillips says. For a year and a half, he racked up footage of his chosen group of Seattle homeless, living in near-homeless conditions himself as he spent every available dime on the film. For much of this time, he had little idea what he would do the footage. He only knew he would have his homeless subjects, sometimes illiterate or lacking teeth, each recite a great speech from history. The idea was to dignify them and present them in a light not often seen on the street.

Trailer for Great Speeches From A Dying World

Raised in Boston, Phillips graduated from NYU with a degree in experimental theater in 1999, and later spent time working with developmentally disabled children in New York City. He came to Seattle in 2004 to work with local filmmaker and dancer Dayna Hanson. At some point, he picked up a camera and began teaching himself to become a filmmaker.

“What did you think of the speeches?” Phillips asks. “I actually got to know [the subjects] better by asking them to do those.” He tells of one instance in which his Native American subject moved to California, and Phillips managed to raise enough money for a Greyhound bus to visit him and shoot the man reciting his speech.

“I don’t want to sound condescending, but it was like… like teaching a llama to walk on two legs,” he says. “It was completely not natural. He wanted to do it, but he got so frustrated and he kept freaking out on me. He would say ‘I can’t do it man, I got no teeth!’” In the end, the speech was impossible, and Phillips returned to Seattle without the footage.

“Some people might say my film is too dense or too dark… but I have a high tolerance for that. They live in an apocalyptic world.”

However, others of his subjects in the film successfully deliver rousing renditions of speeches like Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman,” John F. Kennedy’s “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You,” and the 1854 speech of Chief Sealth. The effect can be startling, as Phillips’ characters break from stories of drug abuse, alcoholism, and their overwhelming feelings of failure to speak the words of society’s most respected individuals with confidence.

“Some people might say my film is too dense or too dark,” Phillips says. “But I have a high tolerance for that. From the point of view of these people, they live in a dark, dying, apocalyptic world. It’s about the loss of trust you have in the world. You take that for granted.”

“In a way their hardships made my struggle working on the film seem small,” he adds. “I think I was able to harness some of that dark, depressive energy.”

Phillips clearly has the trust of his interviewees. Characters like Tomey Smith speak candidly about smoking crack, others a childhood history of sexual abuse. Preparing a sleeping mat for the night under a bridge, Smith shows Phillips his vials of AIDS medication wrapped in a package the size of a picnic basket. Later Phillips interviews an ex-girlfriend of Smith’s, whose life he may have damaged irreparably through his habits of drug dealing and addiction.

“I didn’t set out to become friends with Tomey,” Phillips explains. “It was just over time. For a while he was just a guy that we liked each other enough to do a project together.” Later, as the film became more difficult for Phillips to pursue, he found a friend in Smith when, he says, “No one else would hang out with me.”

“He was a friend when I wasn’t sure I should continue, and hanging out with him made me want to go shoot the other characters.” The two met when Phillips visited a park in Pioneer Square, where Smith was waiting to get food. “He had this bottle of Tobasco sauce in the pen pocket of his jeans jacket,” Phillips remembers. “I just thought that was so perfect. I always wanted to get a shot of him with the sauce, but I couldn’t catch him.” At first Smith declined to be a part of the film, saying he would be embarrassed if his family saw it. But Seattle being a small town, the two continued to run into each other, and eventually Smith agreed.

“He has a real American spirit, like Jack Kerouac,” Phillips says. “He has this quality that’s really cool, in that he wants to try lots of experiences.”

For Phillips, the central difference between the homeless and the sometimes drug-infused, bohemian lifestyles of artists and other “hipsters” is education and upbringing. “What’s really interesting in the film is you have a heightened version of personal struggles, that in other people would be more hidden,” he says. Everyone deals with personal problems, whether it be sexual abuse, the death of a loved one, or a devastating disease. With the homeless, he says, “They’re dealing with all their problems, but they’re on the street too.”

“If we could be God and know everyone that’s been sexually abused, it would be alarming,” he adds. While that could make the tragedy of an individual homeless person a moot point in light of the scores of others who have had similar abuses, Phillips says that isn’t so. “This is what affected this guy’s life. Everyone is not really equal. One thing might make someone’s life fall apart, that it wouldn’t someone else.”

As Phillips shops his film to festivals this year, his friend Smith recently celebrated his one-year anniversary of not doing drugs or drinking. In the film, Phillips frequently revisits his subjects a year later and finds them either no different or worse, but Smith appears to be improving. At a recent screening of the film in Portland, Smith told the audience his friendship with Phillips was part of what helped him stay away from drugs.

“I wouldn’t want to take away from what he did on his own,” Phillips says. “There were months when he was just by himself and he could have taken a wrong turn. If I helped Tomey a little bit, it was mainly to illuminate things for himself.”

One character in the film admits that he tries to stay off drugs mainly because he doesn’t want to let his counselor down because this person, he says, “Has done so much for me.” Whether you do things in your life for yourself or so that others might be proud of you, Phillips concludes, the effect can still be positive, whether it be staying off drugs or making a new film.

“You find out who you are by the reflection of yourself in other people,” he says. “You’re connected to what people want to see you do.”