The documentary film Not Going Quietly will make you angry, it will make you cry, and it will give you hope that maybe, just maybe, change can happen for the better. In Not Going Quietly, director Nicholas Bruckman documents the story of 32-year-old Ady Barkan, a young father who is diagnosed with ALS. Knowing he’s going to gradually lose the ability to walk, talk and take care of himself, Barkan first fights with his insurance company and then he takes on Congress.
Director Nicholas Bruckman shooting Ady Barkan
Produced by Amanda Roddy, Bradley Whitford and the Duplass brothers, the film was shot on a Canon C300 MKII by a team of DP that included Ryder Haske, Erin Collett, Alex Pollini, Michael Dwyer, Roddy and Bruckman. It was edited by Kent Bassett on Adobe Premiere.
We reached out to Bruckman and asked him what was likely a very hard task: to pick his favorite scene and walk us through it. Let’s find out what he says…
Which scene was your favorite to direct in Not Going Quietly?
The one where Ady is getting stoned with his comrades at night in the RV. The scene has all of the film’s main characters celebrating the last night of the “Be a Hero” tour. You get to see all of them as their true selves, and it’s a great demonstration of the joyous, communal spirit of activism. It’s a moment when Ady is achieving something so heroic and experiencing something so tragic, and yet being too high to eat a s’more — it’s funny, relatable and poignant.
Describe your approach to this specific scene and the significance it has to the rest of the documentary.
The subtext of this scene is that this is probably Ady’s last road trip, and it’s one of the moments in the film that really feels like a buddy movie. This is a road movie where these young people are taking this guy on his last hurrah, but of course that last hurrah is also about saving our country and democracy – which, in many ways, they succeed at.
Which approaches did you use to direct this scene?
This scene is captured in a verité, fly-on-the-wall style. We really embedded ourselves with the characters on this tour, and they felt that the camera was so omnipresent that they forgot about it.
We were always shooting, always present with the camera and acting as naturally as possible in that circumstance. So often we were both part of the scene and part of the story while also separated from it. I think that’s what gives this scene the level of intimacy that it possesses.
What challenges did you encounter while working on this scene?
We were in a really tight space, and it was just me and one other crew member. We didn’t have the luxury of a sound operator, AC or anything, and the action was unfolding in real time. We didn’t know while we were filming that it was going to end up being such an important moment in the film.
Truly the hardest part about capturing this scene was access; we had spent weeks getting everyone in the scene comfortable with us and our vision that they all let themselves be totally authentic in this moment. It was also hard not to laugh!
What was the dialogue like between you and your team while filming this scene?
I was with our cinematographer, Erin Collett, and the direction was really just to integrate ourselves into the party and for the camera to feel like it was on the road with the gang. In terms of dialogue, by that time on the trip, we had already established a working style, so I didn’t need to communicate any of this to him — he was able to intuit how to get the right coverage.
It was important for us to get 360 coverage when all of our principal characters were in there (Tracey, Helen, Liz and Ady), so we made sure to get a lot of their reactions and not just Ady’s experience — the way he affects the people around him, which is something we tried to infuse throughout the film.
