Interview with Scott Moore, documentary filmmaker (Part 2 of 2)

Picking up where we left off yesterday, here's the second half of my interview with Scott.

TH: This week you announced a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover production for your upcoming film, Becoming Fools. Talk a bit about what this film is about, how you found out about this story, and how the Kickstarter campaign works.
SM: Interestingly, we actually met Italo on our first trip to Guatemala for production of Reparando. we spent some time with him and did a small interview, and got some footage in the streets and with kids. After that first trip and we realized the thread was going to be the war and Italo’s story didn’t blend as well as the others, we decided to put him on the back burner and not include it in Reparando. But we stayed in contact with him. Then last fall after launching Reparando, I was up in Michigan at the film’s premier with Joel van Dyke, a missionary in Guatemala. We were just kicking off Reparando but I was already thinking about what we wanted to do next, since the process takes forever. He mentioned Italo again, so we decided to scout and do research when we went back to Guatemala at Thanksgiving to premier Reparando.

We spent a few days with kids on the streets to get scouting footage, and sketched out a rough version of the story. But then Italo drowned tragically in February. If he had been shot, it would be tragic but more understandable. Drowning seemed so pointless. So, most importantly, now the kids have lost their hero, and we’ve also lost the hero for the story. But his death sort of inspired other people to pick up his dream and carry it forward. It’s not huge now, a little more organic, as you’d expect outside of the US, but there are some of his colleagues who are working with the kids. I liked the idea of clowns as metaphor, since they represent both comedy and tragedy. It was an incredibly beautiful way to represent the reality of these street kids. They have this terrible backstory, but we can turn it into a comedy by using the clown theme. I was originally not sure about this theme, because the clown sort of has a stigma in the US, and people either love it or hate it. But it’s more than a metaphor for the story. My hope is that there will be an event next spring where these kids can perform with professional clowns. Originally, I wanted them to have fun and then also talk about life on the streets. But then as I thought about it, I realized that clowns can communicate non-verbally and act out a scene that communicates truth. They can communicate non-verbally to communicate to the audience, and that’s great, but it’s also cathartic for the kids themselves to help them understand their own story. So I realized that the clown really is a very important detail, and it really gave it more purpose. It’s not just that Italo was a clown, but it really is deeper and richer now.

So Kickstarter is a great platform for raising funds for creative projects. That’s their model, wanting people to fund creativity for the sake of creativity, not to gain a profit out of it. There are incentivesas small thank yous, but not a profit, per se. The way it works is setting a financial goal and setting a timeline, and through social media you ask people to make a pledge. Each pledge level has incentives to say thank you. Over the course of the time set for the campaign, if you raise the total goal you keep it minus the Kickstarter fee. If the goal isn’t met, no money is exchanged. It makes perfect sense. We went back and forth with how to set our goal. There are some who have reached their goals, but a whole slew that have set much lower goals. I looked at the numbers from every side, and we really need more than $150,000, but that’s the bare minimum. So we prayed, “God, if you want us to do it, everything is yours anyway, so you’ll do it.” So we said, let’s set the goal at what we really need, and then trust that God will provide. I read recently that Kickstarter projects that make it to the 30% mark actually have a 90% chance of being fully funded. It’s a psychological thing, a point at which people get behind it.

TH: For those who watch your films and decide they want to do something to help those living in slums or on the streets of Guatemala City, how would you suggest they do that?
SM: One of our models for telling stories is we like to partner with organizations that are there on the ground responding to needs. We work with EdT, a ministry, a partnership in Guatemala between Shorty and Tita and several others. Joel [van Dyke] provides some leadership for that. In the beginning we wanted people to funnel funds through us, but we realized that we’re storytellers and we can’t handle all the details of funding and connecting, so now on our website we link to organizations and are working on official partnerships. We’re hoping Compassion or World Vision and some others will get involved. We also hope to inspire those working in their own bubbles to get connected and collaborate. With every story we partner with those responding to the needs represented -- hands on ministries. We ask that people connect directly through them, but we can also work as a facilitator to help connect people with these ministries.

What’s unique about Reparando is that people have watched it and have then applied it locally. The film’s stories take place in Guatemala but the concepts are actually universal. So where’s our own La Limonada? Some people might say, “At this point we can’t get to Guatemala, but we can make a difference here.” I love that, because that’s authentic. Not everyone can get to Guatemala, but everyone can make a difference where they are. The new film laser-beam focuses on street kids, and hopefully it will encourage people to respond in their cities. I live in Nashville, and we have 2000 kids in this school district who are considered homeless. That blew my mind because this is Nashville! And those are the documented ones, since they are registered at schools. Tita says the number is at least 12,000 in Guatemala City, though the official number says 6,000. There are kids living in the street everywhere. We just want to give people a place to run to and find redemption.