This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL
This is a film that blends vérité scenes with imagined scenes where real people, non-actors, were asked to just go about life in front of the cameras. But the scene itself, in the case of the funeral as pictured above, would not have existed without the framework of the film. Other scenes were purely natural, with us filming live events but with two young girls —dancers with coal family connections that we cast— just being kids in the moment. It was a constant recalibration and humbling experience to dream big, fail massively, and then get back up the next day and try again. This type of filmmaking required everyone on our team to think on their toes about how to best capture the magic of real life and always ask how this might work in our overall narrative.
King Coal is whole-heartedly a product of taking creative risks. We filmed this over three years and we were led from shoot to shoot based on reactions and creative impulses of our team and Appalachians we filmed with. Some ideas for shots and scenes came to me as a single image from my imagination, or a memory from childhood that I wanted to recreate. Others were spontaneous ideas that popped into our minds while being immersed in the environments we filmed in. The entire act of filmmaking and creating this film was a call and response between our team and the land and people we were filming. Much credit goes to our small, but mighty, on-the-ground producing team – Diane Becker, Shane Boris, Molly Born, Clara Haizlett, Curren Sheldon, and Elijah Stevens – who took my craziest ideas for scenes like king coal’s funeral, and made them a reality.