Armed with just his laptop and a self-deprecating sense of humor, Wilson skewers the way the rush to earn accolades has skewed the way many documentary filmmakers (himself included) see and value their work. In this conversation with fellow live cinema practitioner Maya Daisy Hawke (editor of Oscar-winning Navalny), Wilson talks about why this critique is best-suited for a live performance, why he embraces failure in this very form, and what conversations he hopes to incite in documentary spaces. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. — Manuel Betancourt

MAYA DAISY HAWKE: I thought we would start with a question about a question. I was recently a part of a live cinema event with Joe Bini called Edit Your Way Through Life. You were there and asked us about how we felt when we did live work. I was curious why you wanted to know that, and I would love to know how you would answer that question.

KEITH WILSON: I wanted to ask that question because, as somebody who does live cinema, it is something I think about a lot. I experience a lot of emotions, both preparing it, and going through the conceiving, and the editing, and piecing all these disparate materials together, but also emotions in terms of the piece itself, and in terms of preparing to be the person who holds the space of the event, and very much is a part of the event.

MDH: It’s definitely part of the high wire act of it that is as old as time. Watching somebody get up on stage and potentially fall without a net is priceless. How could you not want to see that? To put myself in that position, I always ask myself, Why am I doing this? And often, right when the lights go on, What was I thinking here?

KW: So, your Why am I doing this? moment happens right when it starts?

MDH: When does yours happen?

KW: Mine usually happens the day or a couple of days before, when I’m scrambling to get ready. It’s like, Why am I doing this to myself? And I have to walk myself back and be like, Well, this is what I do. I remember I saw you, Joe, and Sam Green, the night before this piece premiered at CPH, and each of you was like, “It’s going to be great. You’re going to do fine.”

MDH: You can’t talk about live cinema without talking about Sam Green. For me, he was really important. You knew him back in the day, in San Francisco, right?

KW: Sam Green was my first documentary teacher at Film Arts Foundation. I’d never taken a film class or anything, so he was my first documentary and film teacher. And then a few years later, at the Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, which doesn’t exist anymore, it was this beautiful blend of those two forms—he did one of his first pieces on his laptop. I actually don’t even remember the content, but I remember the form. It was a very early Sam Green; it wasn’t very polished. He was just on his laptop, I think he had a composer or somebody doing music, but it was very pared down, and it was really exciting to me because I just saw the potential for another way of making documentary. 

MDH: I saw him perform a piece in LA right before I gave my first Sundance Lab master class. And I thought about Sam and his laptop and the microphone, and I was like, Oh, this is it. At that time, I was really early in my career, and I didn’t have anything to show, really, except for my work I was distributing on Facebook, which was why I was there. But I made a piece, showed a video I’d shot in cutting rooms, and told stories about films I’d been fired from or had quit, instead of doing a masterclass. And with live music. And it was a great moment for me, but it was really hard to convince the tech side of it to go along with the idea. The projectionist, who ultimately was wonderful, was like, “No, we’ll play the clips, and you do the talking.” I always find that the tech is the hardest part about live cinema. 

KW: It’s a bit of a teaching moment for tech staff that is usually competent, but not really set up or hired to  understand what I’m doing. For my last piece, Moore for Sale, which premiered at Camden a few years ago, part of the performance is about failure. It’s about my failure to get a film made, and so in the performance I fail, and so I’m giving this away, but my computer glitches. I fail in front of everybody, and I have to make sure that the tech staff is okay with that, that they don’t rush to help me fix the glitches that are planned and embedded into my keynote presentation.

MDH: That’s so genius. That’s leaning into the whole danger. People don’t realize; They think the danger is you standing up there, but the danger is a technical disaster.

[Editor’s Note: As if on cue, Keith’s Zoom cut out at this exact moment, and it takes him a few minutes to come back]

MDH: You’re back! Okay, so tell me more about tech issues.

KW: Well, you have to get people on board with the idea, and then have to take responsibility for helping you do it. They’re there to make sure things are seamless, so when I don’t want something to be seamless, polished, or perfect, I have to be like, “This is the reason this is going to happen.”

Could you talk a little bit more about your Sundance masterclass, what it was supposed to be, what you were expected to do, and then what it turned into and why? I sortaknow the story, but I don’t think many people do.

MDH: As an editor, my favorite thing in the world is when people come visit my cutting room, and I get to show them stuff. I just imagined it was like a giant cutting room, and everybody was looking over my shoulder at what had just come out of the oven that moment. I knew that I could pretend like I was ad-libbing, but actually scripted it, and I rehearsed the hell out of it by myself, so that everything would land. It would seem like I was just riffing, but suddenly it would land in sync with the picture—casual, but perfectly timed, which is exactly what I’m going for as an editor in all my editing, so that it does not feel contrived. Especially in documentary, you feel like you’re seeing something unfold, with magical timing. That’s what I’m always going for.

KW: I didn’t realize that it was planned in order to make it look as if it was just off the cuff. Very impromptu, very conversational, but rehearsed.

MDH: It’s like what you do with the technical malfunction as a device. You’re seeing my screen capture, and it looks like you’re in my screen. Then suddenly you’re playing something, and it becomes quite formal and beautiful. But it comes out of a real scratchiness.

KW: What did that do for you personally, for your artist self? 

MDH: I always come at this as an editor, and it felt really important to me to represent editors as real. It was a way for me to be visible and to be a character in this world who sometimes said unexpected things, or to be a bit more outspoken and frank about my experience as an editor. Do you think of yourself as a character when you’re on stage?

KW: I do, and I think that’s part of the anxiety, getting into that character, and accepting the responsibility and the expectation that other people have of being a character with emotions. It’s one of the reasons I want to do it in the documentary space: we’re expected to be hyper-competent. It’s always about trying to convince funders or the industry that I’m competent, that I can deliver a film, that it’s going to be exactly how I pitch it, that it’s going to do great work in the world, and I just find that too often to lead myself and others to produce not great work. I like being the person who fails in public. And my privilege allows me to do that without suffering any real consequences.