Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker: 'We do this whole thing with a crew of just the two of us'

WE DON’T DESERVE DOGS - SXSW

CLAPPER: Looking at the subject matter and the title of the film We Don't Deserve Dogs. I'm guessing that both of you are quite a big fan of our canine friends, but what drew you to sort of make this documentary? 

Rose: Yep, you are completely right there, we both grew up with dogs, my family have always had Labradors, at least two of them at any given time so have I’ve always loved dogs. We travel a lot and on our travels we see how other people live and we see other people when they're families and there's usually a dog so it's something we've noticed that is really common thing it's everywhere you go and you don't really think too much about it, but that's the kind of thing we like making films about.

That seems to be a theme with the films you’ve made so far, your first documentary feature was Barbeque which was structured in a similar way, you initially approach a specific theme in that case BBQ and in this case our relationship with dogs and let that lead your films into exploring wider themes about human society?

Matthew: Yeah we love telling stories about things that especially in the western world we think of just a very ‘everyday’ something you don't often think about. I've never thought about what other countries do as part of a part of the cooking and barbecue culture and in this case how do people in other countries relate to their dogs. These are things that bring cultures together as well as separate them so with We Don't Deserve Dogs the way that we interact with dogs in the relationships we have with them, you know, there's a lot of very big similarities around the world but then the way it plays out visually is just so different, you know, cultures have such differences between them.

R: Yeah, we love taking these simple everyday things and looking at how people interact with them across the world as a way of starting a bigger conversation. You know, We Don’t Deserve Dogs is not actually so about dogs. But people and their stories can simulate with barbecue you think oh it's just going to be a cooking show but it's more than that.

The choice of subjects was fascinating, how do you pick them and do you have a wide pool to pick from, what with the film covering so many different countries?

R: We work independently which gives us a lot of flexibility kind of do whatever the hell we want so the way that played out in this film was that we did not have this big pre-planned three year schedule, we thought we're going to go here and then there.  We had to shoot it in sort of fits and starts so we would shoot in a few countries come home and see what that story was then go away again and spend a lot of time in mountains before diving back into a deep urban setting whilst not really knowing what works until afterwards.

Through seeing photos online of people and their dogs you can get a sense of how that culture interacts. Then if any particular stories jump out, we would usually reach out to a local researcher in that country and sometimes we work with professional fixers as they're called but more often we work with young filmmakers, photographers or writers and reporters. 

We found out about the charity in Uganda that is helping using street dogs as a way to help as child soldiers deal with PTSD and we contacted them and they were more than happy for us to come and talk to everyone involved, which was great. 

The easier bits of the film to make was actually going to Scotland where we spent time with dogs in the pubs because we can speak English and just wandered into pubs talking to people until we found the right subjects. Visiting pubs across the UK was certainly one of the more enjoyable bits of the production!  The only problem that leads chaos to reign so you hope that some kind of structure comes out of it.

So how long does a film like this actually take to put together, at some point you must have had to resist temptation to find more subject and have cut where you say ‘that’s it, this is what we have to work with’?

R + M:  Well, we shot over a thirteen-month period, we would for a month and come back for a month sort editing as we went piecing the stories together and we realized that we had eighty-four minutes and it was good. It felt like a movie so we started really cutting that and thought if we go and shoot more then it means having to cut to some of their stories that we already had. Our budget was not infinite so you need to be wary of that, it’s the flip side of being your own boss. You don’t have someone breathing down your neck telling you to ‘cut this’ or ‘put that there’ so this could have easily been a ten-year project, like the Orson Welles film that took forty years to finish (The Other Side of the Wind) but because we were editing as we went along it was around Christmas time where thought, yeah that it, we love it now. It did help having a deadline though to submit to SXSW so we locked it down.

Do you find deadlines are helpful?

R + M: Oh absolutely it’s really hard to find that drive sometimes, especially on such a large program that you start in one country and end in another. The first country we shot in was Romania and we were like climbing up and down mountains, integrating with this traditional Romanian shepherd family for about two weeks. That’s cool don’t get me wrong but then you suddenly have the realisation that it’s only about six percent of the film shoot. The SXSW deadline really gave us the drive to get the film done and look after things like music and subtitles, all the work to get it finished.

One of the things that stuck out for me was how beautifully the film was shot, often with documentaries they are shot very functionally, that didn’t feel like the case here?

M: We actually don’t watch a huge amount of documentaries and I feel that ‘Documentary’ is a great catch-all phrase for a whole type of film but it's also very limiting in a certain way because it means that some people reduce documentary down to what it says like an essay and then you end up with all these tropes of documentary that sort of just fall into the familiar patterns like I'll just do a drone shot here, we'll chuck emotion graphic over that and now we've got a documentary. 

R: Or shoot it with a handheld camera and it never looks great.

M: Our expression certainly comes more from narrative cinema, we see out documentaries as narrative cinema but with characters, we could have never written ourselves, we try and pick subjects who speak better than I could write! 

We do this whole thing with a crew of just the two of us, I do the pictures and Rosie does the sound, we do it all with two backpacks, it’s very doable now.

R: There is no excuse for films to look terrible anymore, our camera is tiny and it still looks amazing, you just have to have a little discipline in the way use it.

M: You used to have a decision to make especially in documentary, twenty years ago, it was like you either had to shoot on Digibeta which is cost-effective but doesn’t look great or shoot a 35mm Baraka like thing in which case you had to have this gigantic budget. But you couldn't shoot much for those type of films, you could do beautiful vistas but you’d struggle to record five hours’ worth of interview with someone. You certainly could put it all on a hard drive in your backpack and smuggle it out of the country.

So what sort of equipment did you use the achieve some the films visuals within such remote locations?

M + R: So new toys that give you the particular ability to do steady-cam style shots with something that fits in your backpack weren’t (in my opinion) around two years ago and that’s why we had to almost wait until now because dogs, of course, they've run all over the place! I'm not the physically strongest guy in the world and the fact that I could lumber after these dogs like to get a fluid tracking shot and it’s akin to what they were doing in Children of Men ten years ago! 

Even further back if you look at film in the 90s it’s really defined by budget, like the Dogme 95 films, they had to come up with an aesthetic because that's all they could afford. Now filmmakers have all the options you can like make it look cinematic, you can make it look as pretty as you want but it still has to have a good story, you see a lot of ‘Travel Porn’ and things like that but that’s not we were going for.

How important is the teamwork to the project, you mentioned earlier that it’s basically just the two of you, is that helpful to you the kind of films you make? 

M + R: So Matt directs and shoots, I produce and record the sound on set, we both edit, all the post-production is done in house, the colour grade, the sound mix, a 5.1 score is mixed in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. The only extra person is our composer and that’s it, a very small group.

Out on location, it’s just the two of us and a local translator, usually a crew of three although in places where we speak the language, it’s just the two of us. That really helps with the intimacy, you get more out of everyday people when you have a young couple with a tiny camera rather than a full crew with an angry person banging a clipboard!  Film this way isn’t just about budget we think impacts the stories you get from people.

From my perspective, there’s no such thing as ‘Cinema Verite’ as soon as you put a camera in front of people their behaviour will change, that’s human nature? 

M + R:  Absolutely right you're more likely to get a closer to truth out of people if they're less aware and that doesn’t really happen with a big camera crew. We do take the time to actually try to get to know people a little bit so talking to them is a little more natural. Some of the guides we’ve worked with in different countries have worked with big news outfits like BBC News or CNN and they don’t always take the time to listen to what they are being told, they are in and out working to tight deadlines. Where we can we’ll hang with people for a bit, its put them at ease and it’s a better a process for everyone involved.

Going on the elephant in the room, the film was originally going to debut at SXSW which has sadly now been cancelled, where does that leave you in terms of distribution for the film? 

M + R: Well every filmmaker wants a theatrical run so that is certainly the dream but everyone’s reassessing their dreams right? so to end up streaming somewhere would be great, we just want people to see the film. SXSW was the first major festival to be cancelled and it was a big deal for us as when we screened Barbeque it was picked up on the spot by NETFLIX but there will be more film festivals and we certainly would love to be screened at those. It’s also about finding the right home for your content, it’s like the wild west for streaming services at the moment, you ideally want one with the right vibe that fits your material, a bit like the cult DVD label back in the 90s.

Do you have any plans for follow up projects?

M + R: We’re in the brainstorming phase at the moment, maybe looking shoot something a little smaller in scope, we got some ideas for a bunch of stories we’d like to tell in America but that’s as far as it’s got so far.

Finally, I’ve got to ask, do we deserve dogs?

M + R:  Some of us do.  We posited the question because it’s phrase that’s used in a lot of memes on the internet and the way we looked at it was that dogs, they look up to humans with all of this love and that dogs think better of us than we probably are. Humans have an ability to be amazing to dogs and amazing to each other, but they also have an ability to not be so great to each other. 

If anything comes from the last month or so is just watching a lot of people step up as a global community to fight this virus and having to make grand sacrifices that we’ve been really impressed with and like if humans had handled everything this way then yes we totally deserve dogs.

WE DON’T DESERVE DOGS is yet to receive a release date after the cancellation of SXSW. Read CLAPPER’s review.