"You Can Always Pick Up a Spoon and Start Digging": David C. Roberts on His New Short 'To Escape'
In the conclusion to his collage trilogy, director David C. Roberts cuts together clips from 28 classic prison movies to craft a singular narrative about human endurance. Called To Escape, this ambitious short film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and explores what it means to keep pushing forward—a theme that hits close to home for Roberts following his diagnosis with incurable blood cancer. Set to a driving score that really brings the point home (you’ll see how below), the film without a doubt sets to turn numerous iconic cinema escape attempts into a quiet but also thunderous testament to perseverance and survival amongst all else. The Movie Nerds sat down with David C. Roberts to discuss the creative puzzle behind his new short, his unique approach to collage filmmaking, and why you should never count yourself out.
Salvatore Cento: As much as To Escape displays a prisoner/prison dynamic through its many assorted scenes, the short film starts off with a sentence from Ecclesiastes 9:10. This automatically broadens the meaning of the events in the film. Why choose to start To Escape like this?
David Roberts: That quote (and chapter) was the north star for this project from the beginning. In the language of our film, it means to me that no matter how tough the situation, you can always pick up a spoon and start digging.
Cento: According to the credits, twenty eight classic prison movies (from the 1930s to just about the 1980s) were used in the making of To Escape. What was the process like in deciding what made the cut to the final version? Did you look through many looking for some finer details or did you come to use whichever films had scenes that followed the story you wanted to tell?
Roberts: I started with a trio of process-oriented films (that I also happen to love) - Le Trou, A Man Escaped, and Escape from Alcatraz - and then expanded out to include movies I had seen that meant something to me. So it wasn’t systematic. One of my constraints was that I never wanted to include films that I watched when they came out - I have a different relationship with those - and I haven’t included them in any of these short collage films.
Having said that, we were definitely not assembling our favorite moments. We were looking for shots/actions that could advance this new story, even if we had to kill our darlings.
Cento: To Escape is a story about the will to keep going. This obviously ties in with your own personal fight against incurable blood cancer. What were some of the feelings running through your head while putting all of these different scenes together? Especially the closing shot?
Roberts: I did want to explore the theme of perseverance in this film, and one of the motivations was my diagnosis. But I hope this film works without this background knowledge. The protagonist is not simply David Roberts, cancer guy.
When we were in the weeds of making the film, the everyday concern was whether we could tell a compelling story through these clips. The closing shot was meant to show this protagonist would never give up, no matter what. I had thought this was a redemptive and aspirational story, but some of my friends thought it was very dark. I guess once it goes out there it is no longer ours.
Cento: As we just previously discussed in the last question, the message that is sent across to viewers in To Escape comes from you - as an individual fighting a battle.
Roberts: I see it more as an individual never giving up in a hopeless situation, rather than fighting a particular battle. The cancer “battle” idea has never rung true for me. It feels more like I have moved to another country with different rules, limitations, and delights. In this new country, I wanted to explore what it feels like to put one foot in front of the other.
Cento: Your last three shorts (High Noon on the Waterfront, Song of My City, and To Escape) all premiered at Telluride. Do you see them as a trilogy and what connects them?
Roberts: Yes - they all are collage films in that they tell stories via classic film clips, but in different genres. I didn't intend a trilogy when I first started these, and I think each film became an increasingly ambitious experiment.
Philip Glass music became an unexpected recurring element in all three, despite their different music needs. For To Escape, we initially cast the net wide as always (we started with a Bach spiritual piece for To Escape) but we found that Glass’s A Descent into the Maelström had the perfect mix of awe, momentum, and a hint of the divine for this story.
And most importantly, I want to mention two of my wonderful collaborators - John Sears (the genius editor behind these films) and Lisa Callif (our fair use champion) - who have worked on all three films too.
Cento: But you also say that this third entry is your most ambitious as well. Could you explain this a bit more? Were there more challenges this time around? What was it about the filmmaking process this time around that made it stand differently from?
Roberts: By most ambitious, I was referring more to pushing this collage format into different genres. Our first film in this trilogy - High Noon on the Waterfront - was a documentary where we used only two films to tell the stories of their filmmakers. We had narration from Edward Norton and John Turturro and even cheated with some real archive footage. The second, Song of My City, was a city symphony with a loose through thread. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy to make that one and actually took us longer than the other two combined - but we hadn’t constrained ourselves to tell a story with a clear arc. In To Escape we tried to tell a narrative story only with film clips. I think each one got more ambitious and also less certain that we would have a coherent film at the end, but I hope we got a little bit better with each one. Maybe this is just recency bias.
Cento: This collage style of film - that you have picked up starting with High Noon On The Waterfront and also being found in one of your inspirations - Los Angeles Plays Itself is a very stylistic way of expressing a story - using many other theatrical perspectives to create your own. In a broad sense, what is it about this way of making a film that appeals to you so much?
Roberts: When Guy Maddin interviewed me last year, he called this type of filmmaking a vivisection of cinema. There’s a kind of hyperawareness when I watch films like these: on one level, you are following the filmmaker’s macro story, and on another your mind is recognizing discrete clips from other movies even though they have been co-opted to propel a new one. It is certainly a different experience from watching a conventional film.
By the way, I am glad you mentioned Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself which was such an inspiration. I should also mention Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog and Christian Marclay’s The Clock - both of which were enormous influences. These are masterpieces and I encourage everyone to watch them, but please not before my films - the bar would be too high (am kidding, watch theirs immediately if you can).
Cento: In your mind - as the one behind all three of these films - do you plan on making more of this genre/type?
Roberts: Over the last two years since my diagnosis, I’ve noticed that when I am trying to figure out what I am thinking, I feel compelled to write essays on, say, what suddenly seemed important or how to tell my son. But when I am trying to explore a feeling, I am compelled to make these movies.
Although I’m working on some different types of projects right now, this form still holds a kind of magic for me, so I could see myself coming back. After all, these are the types of movies I wanted to make ever since I started in films.
Cento: That is it! Thank you for the conversation, Mr. Roberts. This has been great.Roberts: You’re welcome. It’s been a delight talking to you.
To Escape premiered at Telluride Film Festival last week and is currently showing at Laemmle Royal in LA for a week as well, September 10th to September 17th.
David C. Roberts is a former diplomat and academic physicist, and currently a filmmaker and writer based in NY.
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