The CulturePulp Q&A: Farmer John Peterson and 'The Real Dirt on Farmer John' director Taggart Siegel


Much-longer version of an interview in the Wednesday, Feb. 1 Oregonian:


When filmmaker Taggart Siegel decided to make a documentary about his pal, the hard-working, proudly eccentric artist/writer/farmer John Peterson -- he wasn't lacking in raw material.

Siegel had footage from three films he'd shot at Peterson's troubled Illinois farm since 1980. He had stunning 8mm home-movie footage spanning decades of rural life -- much of it shot by John's mother. And he had CNN footage of John acting out his life in plays with local farmers in 1987.

He assembled this rich celluloid archive into "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" -- a funny, harrowing and ultimately inspiring doc about Peterson's lifelong romance with the family farm.

Peterson narrates his strange life story as he turns the farm into a counterculture enclave in the '60s. As he deals with false accusations of Satanism and worse as he's shunned by his neighbors in the '80s. And finally, as he rebuilds his farm into a "community-sustained agriculture" organic-produce outfit in the '90s.

But the stunning archival footage also turns "Farmer John" into something larger and possibly profound: a quirky and beautiful history of the death (and niche-market rebirth) of American family farming.

On Jan. 18, I sat down for an hour with Peterson and Siegel (who's about to move to Portland, where he edited the film) in a decidedly non-agrarian setting -- the Heathman Hotel -- to talk about friendship, "Farmer John," the magic of farming and life after documentary fame. Edited highlights follow the jump.

Click here to read the whole interview!

__________________

MIKE RUSSELL So, Taggart: I hear you're moving to Portland.

TAGGART SIEGEL: Yes. I was first drawn up here because our editor, Greg Snider, who's a local, kept insisting I come up here to edit the film.

Q. Your relationship with John vaguely echoes Zwigoff and Crumb's -- you've made a documentary about an old friend. What's the secret to good documentarian/subject relations?

TS: It's complicated, because I've known John for 25 years. In 1980, I came to his farm and made my first film, "Affliction," based on Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." John plays the good farmer, and footage from that is in "Farmer John."
And in 1982, I made a film called "Bitter Harvest," about John losing the family farm and his way of life. (That's the gritty, black-and-white footage you see throughout "Farmer John.") And then we collaborated on another film, "Ember Days" -- which is about a farmer who goes crazy -- and John acts in that.

JOHN PETERSON: There's a shot from "Ember Days" where they're dumping corn on a loan shark. I walk out [while they're filming], and there's the local dairy man, leaning against the car, watching. And you could see, for him, there was no separation between our film and reality. He thinks we're just over there killing this guy.

Q. Is it more disturbing that he thinks you're killing the guy, or that he's just watching you do it?

TS: [laughs] On "Ember Days," I started thinking about casting some Hollywood actor in John's role … trust got kind of severed. At the end, John said, "I don't want to work with you again on collaborative projects."
So when I came back in '96, I was sort of tiptoeing: "John, I want to make another film about you -- about the resurrection of your family farm. You're an organic farmer now, you've come out of the dark, and I want to document it." And he said, "Okay, you can document it,but I don't want to be involved."
But as we got into the editing stage, he got more involved -- and then he started writing the narration.

JP: I've been writing my life since the mid-'80s, so I take it quite seriously how my life is held up to the world. It's very painful for me to collaborate on the picture of my life. My sister has always said, "No one's interested in your life -- don't bother to write your life, don't make a film about your life. You're not famous, and therefore no one's going to pay attention." But I've always felt is that the power of my life story is telling the truth. When Taggart started this, I was a fanatical accuracy monitor.

Q. Did you resist the urge to mythologize yourself?

JP: I actually thought Taggart was more into mythologizing me than I was. I don't glorify myself; I like to create a space where people reading [my life story] feel affirmed in their own lives -- something I think the film does a very good job of. I don't want to be some organic legend.

TS: Crumb obviously didn't see "Crumb" until Zwigoff was finished with it. I think sometimes documentary subjects can feel a little bit raped, a little betrayed. This is different -- we're close friends, and he had a lot of input. But he's not just getting his way. It's me reflecting on his life. There's a lot of scrutinizing.


Q. "Farmer John"'s biggest draw is its extraordinary archival and home-movie footage. Are there whole other documentaries exploring other avenues of John's life hiding in that raw footage?

JP: I think there is.

TS: I was going to do two separate films at one point -- one on John the farmer, and one on John the eccentric, flamboyant creative artist. That was what was so difficult -- we had to unite the two.

Q. The cliché about bohemian iconoclasts is that they're lazy. But John, you're a 20-hour-workday bohemian iconoclast. How do you keep the grind of farming enjoyable and creative?

JP: It can be deadening. I've been trying to tuck my creative life into the winter. It's very painful for me to shift from creativity into management. My big passion has been my writing.
The thing I'm aching about right now is that I have some books I'm trying to bring forth while we're promoting the film. I have a meeting with my publisher later today; I'm supposed to complete a book next week.

Q. Oh, dear.

JP: It's amazing that the farm can do okay without me. The general manager's running it. I'm a little bit involved. I was only home a few weeks last year. Isn't that wild? I'll be home two hours in the next four months.

TS: John's a management freak, too. He gets it from his Norwegian heritage. His mother was a workaholic, too. She was a farmer and a schoolteacher, but she was also documenting the landscape of the small family farm on 8mm with a teeny little camera -- and somehow knew this was important. She had at least 20 hours of beautiful, beautiful footage. It was an archival gold mine. And I had 25 years of footage. So we had 50 years of footage of this man.

Q. Was all your mother's footage shot with as good an eye as we see in the film?

JP: A lot of it's like what you see in the film.

Q. It's very, very beautifully composed.

JP: Yeah.

TS: Yeah.

[There's a quiet moment.]

Q. Did you know, going in, that you'd be making a movie that's ultimately a history of American farming in miniature?

TS: I knew the archival footage really captured the collapse of the family farm. We were able to put in history, the personal resurrection of John's farm, and suburbia encroaching on family farms.

Q. I'm guessing rural folk aren't usually as media-savvy as you two. The only way their story usually gets told is in bad Sissy Spacek films.

TS: [laughs] I had to stay very objective making this film about my best friend, and remind myself that I'm telling this story for a big audience, not just for our own little group. We didn't know it'd be this big. [laughs] This film will be seen by millions, hopefully.

[Taggart goes upstairs for a conference-call marketing meeting]

Q. What's science doing for your ability to pull extra efficiency out of an organic farm?

JP: Science is a way to measure and evaluate. They're very complex systems -- you can get a professor talking about one variable of an organic farm for an hour.

Q. You do that, you won't get the crop out, I'd imagine.

JP: When people send me the soil analyses with all the numbers, it's like I'm looking at an astrological chart. I just can't do it. But we get fantastic crops -- have been for years. And there's two basic reasons why. We go two years fallow and two years in vegetables. The shareholders bought that land, so we have enough land to have half of it resting. And then we have a compost project, using manure from a dairy farm.
We also have a fleet of equipment that goes way beyond what's necessary for a normal year. Because if a bad year comes along, you've got to be able to mobilize. You design your equipment and staff around an average year, when a bad year comes along, you'll get so hammered -- and that will chase you for years afterward. You have to be a little paranoid if you're gonna farm. I design my plans around bad things happening.

Q. Someone once said "All art must become fine art to survive." Is there any parallel between that statement and the move of small farms to niche organics as they fight to survive?

JP: It's a great analogy -- organics as fine art. With the economic realities of farming today, you have to go into a rarified space to survive.

Q. How's your relationship with your neighbors these days?

JP: Well, I've been pretty … isolationist since that community-hysteria period in the late '80s. I used to invite people to these amazing events and celebrations we had. They just thought it was weird.
When this [hysteria] happened in the '80s, it was so ugly -- and terrifying -- that I didn't want to open up conversations. First of all, people were incredibly suspicious. There was no space for it. I have a lot more friends in New York City than I do in that little community.

Q. Are you ever going to re-stage that play you wrote about farm life in the '80s?

JP: I just want to do performances of my own life.

Q. Like one-man shows?

JP: Yeah. There's all this footage. There's hundreds of pages of my own writing. I have weird stories that happened on and off the farm. And I want to be in New York with these performances.
I've had a yearning for New York my whole life. It's a place I feel very much at home. So I don't know what I can make happen in New York -- it's just that I feel I'm supposed to be there. And you know what? If I do a piece and 50 of my friends come and see it, it's complete for me.

Q. Film can impose story structure on a life. But of course you keep evolving past the end of a documentary. I watch "Farmer John" and I say, "Ah! He's arrived! He's an organic-farming guru now!" But it sounds like you resist that.

JP: Oh, absolutely. I told Taggart, "I think the story of my life is that I got the farm back on its feet -- and now I'm getting ready to move on into other areas." My thing isn't that I wanted to be a farmer; my thing is that I wanted to redeem this farm or redeem myself. I felt a strong commitment to the farm -- but I didn't feel a strong commitment to being the one farming. But in the movie, you do sort of get the vibe that I spend the rest of my life farming.

Q. That was sort of the vibe I got.

JP: Naw. I got other things to do.

Q. You've said, "I really think farms can be places for cultural renewal."

JP: Well, historically, I think that's what farms were. I've read about central Europe in the Middle Ages, and agriculture became the basis for culture. That simplifies things a bit, but it's an interesting model. It certainly interests me.
So much of who we've become as a civilization did originate out of agriculture -- but we're very separated from it now. But as people pour their hearts and souls into new farming models -- community-supported agriculture coupled with biodynamics -- all these people are eating from the same farm, even if they don't all know one another. That's interesting.
One of the things that we've done at our farm is publish a guide, so that people who belong to our farm can publish their services that they offer to the community, so people can get to know one another. It's a way of building community.
All my adult life, I've thought, "Magical things happen at farms." We've had some magical things happen at my farm. Shareholders bought land so we can have a more viable farm. That's an incredible thing. Festivals and creative festivals have their own magic, but this is hard-core.

Q. Toward the end of "The Real Dirt on Farmer John," all these beautiful, idealistic young kids start showing up to do tours of duty on your farm. What are these kids teaching you?

JP: I have to hold my ground a lot against these idealistic but unsustainable ideas … and often these young people have to be humbled. A lot of farms that are run out of idealism can’t survive.
It’s a good question. It makes me feel like kind of a difficult person when I answer it.

[Note: Peterson's significant other (in the film, anyway), Lesley Littlefield, has written a very funny little ditty about this very conflict called "The Farmer John Song."]

Q. Do you have any more long, soul-searching sabbaticals in your future?

JP: Oh, I've been putting in 80, 90, 100-hour weeks for years now. I definitely want a long sabbatical -- a long period of downtime, so that I can explore some new things in life. Write. Perform. Resurrect my social life.

Q. You meet a lot of people -- but they're all me. These disposable meetings.

JP: [laughs] Yeah. When the film runs its course, I think I'll have two books out in the spring -- short stories about farming, and another book about food that goes beyond a cookbook. And then there's my autobiography -- it's over half done. But when these projects are done, with the farm able to run on its own, I'm hoping that time's gonna show up so I can do some concentrated creative work.
____________________

Want to learn more about "The Real Dirt on Farmer John"? Visit TheRealDirt.net.

Also: Shawn Levy's movie review: Farmer John' tills family land, uncovers a wealth of emotion (The Oregonian, Feb. 1, 2005)

Permalink

Posted: Thu - February 2, 2006 at 10:45 AM        

|

©