Past Filmmakers

Joe Murphy
Age Matters
(Premieres October 11, 2003, at 11PM)

1. How did you come up with the idea for the film?

  I have always liked doing programs about topics that people have a strong emotional involvement with and age is definitely one of those topics.  I started working on this program in 1995, a couple of years before my 50th birthday.  For the first time in my life I was starting to feel old and some of my students at the university were starting to react to me as an old guy.  When I started teaching at Appalachian State 28 years ago I was only 27 years old and so I was treated by my students more like a peer.

2. How long did the production process take?  

I started shooting video for this project in 1995 but since I refer in the program to my own reactions to age at different stages in my life, you could say I started working on this program when I was born 55 years ago.  I haven’t been shooting steadily for the past eight years because I have a real job that takes a lot of my time and energy and because I got sidetracked by two shorter video projects for which I got paid.  Since there was no money involved in this project and no sponsor to please other than me and since I’m getting to be an old guy, I took my time on this one.  It typically only takes me a year or two to do a half hour program.

3. What challenges did you experience in the creation of the film? 

The challenge is always to find the energy it takes to do the tremendous amount of work required to create a television program by yourself.  It is also difficult to remain confident that it will be good enough to actually make it to broadcast TV so people can actually see it.  In many ways the struggle to get it made is just the beginning.  The struggle to get people to see it is even more daunting to me.  In this particular program, it was also a challenge because I like to have a lot of humor in my programs and I found the topic of age to not be very funny (for obvious reasons) to most people.  I wanted to leave the viewer with an uplifting feeling about getting older so had to downplay some of the negative aspects of the inevitable physical deterioration that accompanies aging.

4. What is your favorite memory from creating the film? 

I have many fond memories of the people I talked to in the process of doing this program especially my good friend and former student, Jeff Goodman.  I interviewed Jeff and his wife Margot and daughter, Julia, in the Celo community, and Jeff interviewed me at my house and in my office at school and helped me shoot several of the interviews.  I also enjoyed spending the day out at the Penland School of Crafts interviewing a wide variety of creative and entertaining people and in neighboring Burnsville where I talked to 70-something Kitty Couch as she worked on her clay sculptures.  I have interviewed hundreds if not thousands of people over the past twenty-five years and one of the best and most interesting subjects I have ever encountered was 30-year-old Kristin Bell, a student at Penland.  She was one of those rare people who talk in sound bites and are engaging and entertaining and thoughtful in every word they speak.

5. When someone has finished watching the film, what do you hope they take away from the experience? 

In our youth-obsessed culture it is hard for many people to feel like they can enjoy life.  I want everyone that watches the program to feel good about themselves and to look forward to each day they have and enjoy each moment of their short existence here on earth.

6. What type of reaction has your film received from viewers? 

So far the program has been better received by older people than younger ones.  This may be because it expresses the views of an older person, but I think it is also generally true that younger people don’t think as much about age as older people do.  Most young people just assume they are going to live forever.

7. What advice would you give to aspiring young filmmakers? 

The way to learn and get better is to keep doing it and hang around people who know more than you do about it whenever you can.  Volunteer to do some menial task on a professional production so you can be around people who know what they are doing.  Watch and ask questions.  Be patient and learn from your mistakes.

8. Please tell us about the next film you plan to work on.

I am working now on a program about diabetes and how it affects the people who have it and the people close to them who help them deal with it.  I have been an insulin dependent diabetic for 30 years so am doing a first hand exploration of the unique experiences that people who have this incurable disease have encountered.

9. What are your thoughts on the film industry in NC? 

I am a documentary producer and so do not have any real strong feelings one way or another about the fictional/narrative films that are shot in this state.  There are really still very few documentaries produced in North Carolina.  The Full Frame documentary film festival held each spring in Durham is the most exciting thing to happen in North Carolina since I have been living and working here. We are very fortunate to have such an impressive gathering of world class documentaries on display in our state every year.  Anyone with any interest at all in the documentary should not miss that festival.