January 31, 2020

AMANPOUR:
Hello everyone and welcome to “Amanpour and Company.” Here’s what’s coming up. I think it was very divisive what it was about. It’s about identity as the UK finally floats away from Europe. I speak with David Dimbleby, the legendary British broadcaster who broke the Brexit news to the nation. Then let’s look at why we don’t have enough women kind of entering the film industry in the first place, being promoted from assistant to the next level. Opportunity executive position director kitty green tells me about her new film, the assistant and eye-opening drama born of the me too era and Brazilian democracy and I are almost the same age. They thought that in our thirties we would both be standing on solid ground and Oscar nominated documentary artists, whether Brazil is on the brink of authoritarianism.

FUNDERS CREDITS:
“Amanpour and Company” is made possible by Rosalind P Walter Bernard and Irene Schwartz. Sue and Edgar Wachenheim the third, Candace King Weir, the Anderson family fund, the Sheryl and Phillip Milstein family, Charles Rosenbloom, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers. Additional support has been provided by and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

AMANPOUR:
Welcome to the program everyone. I’m Christiane Amanpour in London after a 47 year marriage, the UK is bitter. Divorce from the European union has finally happened. It’s taken the best part of four years since the Brexit referendum, which divided a nation right down the middle, causing now both celebration and mourning. No one yet quite knows what the next chapter will look like for the UK or for the European project because despite Boris Johnson’s jaunty slogan, Brexit is not done. A long complicated process awaits both sides as they are now tasked with fleshing out the details of a new relationship. As correspondent Phil black explains the final chapter in this saga is still a cliffhanger.

PHIL BLACK:
Brexit is happening so the British people can move on and we can all stop talking about it. Right? Not even close because even once British clock strike Friday’s Brexit, our Boris Johnson’s punchy election winning pledge…

BORIS JOHNSON:
We’re going to get Brexit. Doug

AMANPOUR:
…will only be partly fulfilled.

PHIL BLACK:
More than three years of Brexit inspired angst, bitterness and paralysis. January 31 marks the end of what many consider the easy part. Now there’s a new deadline and a whole new mountain of uncertainty. The end of 2020 marks the close of what’s known as the transition period. Until then the UK is out of the EU, but still following its rules. It’s an 11 month window for both sides to thrash out a new functioning relationship, especially on the hugely important issue of trade. Most trade agreements take between three and five years to negotiate. Moving to 11 months is a very condensed schedule. Most trade experts don’t believe that it will be possible and yet Boris Johnson has already found he won’t extend that window. So the cliff edge is back. It’s once again possible Britain could topple out of the EU without a trade deal in place without easy access to its most important market causing enormous economic harm. But don’t worry, won’t happen. Says the prime minister will Brexit. How farmers in lots of ways will be his cheery optimism extends to the quality of the new free trade agreement he wants to negotiate with the EU.

AMANPOUR:
I think that it’s massively in our interests for, uh, in the interest of both the sides of the channel, uh, to have a wonderful zero tariff zero quota, uh, all seeing all dancing FTA. And I’m absolutely confident that we can do that,

PHIL BLACK:
But scratch the surface of Johnson’s hopeful assessment and you see a big ominous contradiction. He says he wants to close trading relationship, but he doesn’t want to closely follow EU regulations. That’s not possible. Says Brussels.

UNIDENTIFIED:
The precondition is that European and British businesses continue to compete on a level playing field. We will certainly not expose our companies to unfair competition.

PHIL BLACK:
Not everyone thinks the coming negotiations or their consequences will be quite as rosy as Boris Johnson suggests, especially if the Brexit slug so far is any measure. Even now as Britain finally leaves the European union, no one knows what Brexit will look like in a year’s time or ultimately what it will mean for the country’s future prosperity.

AMANPOUR:
Now, David Dimbleby is a Titan of British broadcasting for decades. He’s been the face of the BBC and he was in fact the man who delivered the news of Brexit to the public on that fateful morning, June 24th, 2016 and he joined me here in the studio to talk about Britain now making its exit and about his latest project, the sun King. It’s a new podcast, which tackles the complicated legacy of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose papers had a big hand in delivering Brexit. David Dimbleby, welcome to the program. Very much so for decades. You are the face of the BBC, the face of Britain, not just in your special programs, but especially on election and referendum nights. True. Here we are nearly four years after that referendum and we are out of the EU. How do you feel about that?

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
You see me sort of sinking here and it’s not despair. It’s trying to work out how we feel as a country because I’ve never known an issue that so divided the country and yet, which is so misunderstood on both sides. I don’t think anybody really knows yet why people voted the way they did. So, uh, this is, I see this as a kind of another stage, I think in a hundred years from now, uh, your successor and mine may be sitting here saying, sir, how does it feel to be rejoining? So let me play that moment. It was actually the morning after because the final result didn’t really come through until the Dawn Dawn hours of the next day. And this is what you told the British people [inaudible] 20 minutes to five, we can now say the decision taken in 1975 by this country to join the common market has been reversed by this referendum to leave the EU. The British people have spoken. And the answer is, we’re out. And that was 2016 and we’re now in 2020 and we’re only just leaving. Yeah, I mean, that’s the scale of this decision, the difficulty of achieving it all these years. I thought when I said that, but it was true. We’re out. Actually four years later, we’re in just leaving. We still won’t be full. I mean, the deal won’t be done until another 12 months. They quoted Churchill in the war saying, uh, this is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. I mean, we have years to go negotiating with the United States, negotiating with the rest of the world, negotiating with Europe, uh, before we know where we’ll be on trade terms. But the psychological thing has happened, the site, whatever that was, whatever it was, people wanted, the people who voted to leave Europe, third of us, they will be celebrating. I think the people who voted remain accepted. Now they, you know, then there’s no great campaign to reverse it. Now they’ve accepted it and the British are very sort of pragmatic people. In the end. This is, this was divisive, but in a way that was quite unlike our normal way of doing politics. But then not the normal way of doing politics. Like yours is all over the shop. You know, in the United States and here in India, every, all, all politics seems to be this lovely idea of democracy. And it would be, it would work because everybody would be part of the thing. You suddenly realize actually democracy means that the majority rules the minority if we’re not careful.

AMANPOUR:
That is really interesting and I think that’s what make is so divisive here and in the United States because the majority is very slim. It’s not an overwhelming majority, so it’s a very, very slim margin.

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
And yet, and yet that majority rules as though it was absolutely almost dictatorship. I mean Trump does it here. There are signs of Boris Johnson and go to an 80 seat majority. Okay, but the arrogance that comes with that, the feeling that you can do what you want I think is, well, no, not how it’s meant. It’s not how we think of democracy being here.

AMANPOUR:
In the programs that you’ve done subsequent to Brexit, whether it’s a Panorama program, which is the big documentary strand that you have at the BBC, you’ve actually got some examples of people who had these fights, these political fights within their own families. Tell me how deep it runs.

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
I made a film, it was interesting. I made a film about, I made a film about Brexit just in the, in the fall last year and went to various places and I went to, I remember going to a place in South Wales, uh, and talking to a hairdresser who was a labor virtuous socialist voter all her life. And I was very puzzled cause she said, and she was, but she wanted Brexit even though a lot of money goes into South Wales from the European union. So she said, I said, well what is it just doing the hair of the person who had said, Oh I like, I like that Boris Johnson. She has, why? I say, why do I cause he’s a liar. She said he’s a liar. And I said, why do you like him? Cause he’s a lot because that means he’s human and he’s got balls of steel and I completely blend. That sort of passion had been brought forward. I think it was very divisive. What it was about. It’s about identity. It’s not about the economy, it’s about identity. It’s about whether you feel yourself British, great Britain, the United Kingdom, or where do you feel yourself, Britain and European, part of Europe and European culture. I think it’s deeply, deeply almost a romantic view about how you see yourself.

AMANPOUR:
Question time was unique. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. It doesn’t exist in the United States, this forum or anywhere. I never understood why. I mean either. I believe me, I tried to bring, it didn’t work in any of them. I tried to come up with, I can tell you that we took it to the States and every time we did we’d have American audience during the campaign for the presidency and at the end everybody come up and say, why don’t we have this here? I said, I don’t know exactly. Yeah, exactly.

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
I have a theory about why you don’t have, why? Because American political interviewing is much more about how politics is going to play out. If you listen to American political interviewing on those Sunday shows and things, it’s how’s it going to play in the house? How’s it going to knowledge? That’s not, why are you doing this? You know, why? What’s the, what’s the merit of your Iranian policy? What’s the like, it’s, how’s it going to play with the foreign affair?

AMANPOUR:
And so it’s very much about politics rather than, it’s like inside the beltway as they say.

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
That’s why the British politicians who are used to the hustings and used to the battle with the audience, were good at question time. And I think in the United States, my guess is that everybody would pull back a bit from that level of political aggression.

AMANPOUR:
We speak at a moment when secretary of state, Mike Pompeo was challenged in an interview to, to, to, you know, talk about the U S policy on Iran and on Ukraine. He didn’t like the way the interview went. He became very angry. And then he banned the organization NPR, which is part of the PBS public broadcasting family, from covering his latest trip abroad. You know, this is a problem. Did you ever find that the politicians were shying away more and more from you?

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
Well, I think, uh, first of all, I think it’s very sad that, I mean, it’s not, it’s not the end of the world is it? Politicians don’t, you can’t, people always use to say, why can’t you get the politicians to answer the question? I say, I don’t have a gun. No, but just get them onto your program onto I can’t get, I can’t force people onto a program and I mean I’ve had a, I mean this present conservative government are refusing to appear on Britain’s main morning radio show. They just won’t allow any minister to go on. I think that’s pretty stupid really. And, and also I think counterproductive because as with Pompei where once people know, Oh, Pompez so frightened he went allow this little broadcasting organization on his airplane. Come on politicians, you can’t force them. But my God, the democratic process is going to suffer if politicians refuse to come and talk to you. You know, because that is part of the deal, isn’t it? And I think the electrode in the end will sense that’s part of it.

AMANPOUR:
I wonder because now all these people have their own outlets. Let us now go to your latest piece of work, which is a podcast called the sun King. You did a six part series on the power of the Murdoch family. Talk about an alternative route for politicians to get their voices out. Rupert Murdoch was one of the first who allowed that particularly it culminated with Fox news in the United States. Why, what, what do you find important and powerful about him?

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
Um, first of all, I’m fascinated by him. I in a small way, I was a newspaper proprietor myself and I had my troubles with trade unions, which he had at the same time. So I was, I had a kind of affinity with them. Second, I interviewed him when he came from Australia to London to set up his newspaper business and I was very curious that fleet street, the British heart of the British newspaper industry were very snotty about him coming, who is this whip? A snapper from Australia, you know, and I thought, Oh, this is interesting. And so I interviewed him. Then I interviewed him when he bought the times, big London newspaper, uh, about whether he was a fit person, you know, very, very pompous on my part.

AMANPOUR:
Well, no, most people felt that the times of London was a massively important new space. Still is, still is. I say Fox I quick, I cannot understand it’s also a commercial enterprise, but why did he back Brexit? Why did he back Trump? These are two positions took in 2016. That one might say worked for him. He has the tabloids in this country, which many people say convinced the voters. He has Fox news in the, in the United States, which was the, and is the, um, you know, conduit for essentially the Republican party.

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
I think he has a broad idea about capitalism that he believes in capitalism and he believes in, uh, he doesn’t like restrictive practices. He wants to clear the decks. He believes in the Murdoch empire expanding and growing, and he’ll do anything political that’s needed to do that. So he’ll cozy up. I mean, remember what he said about Trump when he first had lunch with him. I won’t use the full explicative but you, he, he came out of the lunch and he said he’s an F idiot, you know, and then Trump began to do well and suddenly Murdock and Trumper. I mean the pounding, every single apparently yes. What they say. I cannot imagine. Can you, but anyway, I think, I don’t think he’s, I don’t think he’s a political power broker. I think he enjoys being close to politics and he, I think he’s very good at, uh, smelling the breeze. Do you say? No. Knowing the way the world’s going, I mean, big decisions. And in other words, he listens to his good at listening, catching, they’re catching the ear of, of a country. But I mean, Fox news is a completely different story cause that’s the most extraordinary. Uh, and that’s quite, that again, is quite dangerous of our television. I mean, you know, I’ve worked for the BBC all my life. You work CNN. I mean, let’s face it, BBC as a public service broadcast. But we would say whatever our prejudices when we were working, when we were broadcasting or reporting, we would put them as far as we could to one side. We would never ever say, Oh, this is my chance to put my view forward about this. So about that or who should be president, who shouldn’t have Fox news. Exactly the opposite. Any chance to get in a, you know, a crack at a crack, at something, put forward, an opinion, sneer at something, they take it and it’s legitimized. And I think that’s dangerous.

AMANPOUR:
Michael Gove, a key Brexit minister here in, in, in great Britain, famous, he said the people have had enough of experts, president Trump trash talks, the mainstream media calling it fake news all the time. And it’s had the very unfortunate effect of, of really cutting into where people think they can turn for the truth. And I just want to ask you because it’s, it’s one of those, it’s a hard time. It’s 75 years since the liberation of, um, of Auschwitz. Your father was a very, very renowned journalist and foreign correspondent and he was one of the first, if not the first, to enter the camp at Belson and report back what he saw and almost nobody, in fact, maybe nobody had heard in somebody’s independent voice. What was going on in there. They didn’t even, I know this is, this is the thing and I want to ask you about it. Let’s play with, he said first.

R. DIMBLEBY:
I’ve seen many terrible sites in the last five years, but nothing, nothing approaching the dreadful interior out of this hotter Belson, the dead and the dying Lake coast together. I picked my way over Culp, softer copes in the gloom until I heard one voice that Rose above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age four she had practically no hair left on her head. I’d have faced was that only a yellow Parchman sheet with two holes and advise?

AMANPOUR:
It is. It is still horrible to, to listen to how many times and how do you feel?

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
A shiver when I heard. And, and when he sent that dispatch back to London, they wouldn’t put it out straight away. They wanted to check that it was true. I don’t know what they thought he’d gone off his head or something, but they waited 24 hours. I think it was until they broadcast it. Now it’s a, it was played here at uh, the uh, Auschwitz Memorial Holocaust Memorial day. They play it every year cause it’s the one really vivid, it’s the one broadcast where somebody has walked in there and seen it for the first time with their own eyes

AMANPOUR:
And there’s more of it. And we’ve played, we’ve played it over the years and each time, I know it’s your father, but it gives me the shivers as well. And he broke down several times apparently even just trying to deliver that report. Did he ever talk to you about it?

DAVID DIMBLEBY:
Never. I did–He talked to me about it once section now. Um, I um, I did get on, I went, I went to Belson for CBS for a joint BBC, CBS broadcast about the day. And my father was doing it with Walter Cronkite on the beaches and Normandy. And I was sent, because I was his son to Belson and I remember him saying, you birds don’t sing there. And I went there and there were people picnicking and the birds singing and I thought that’s a sort of Gulf between what it was like in 45 and what it was like. This must have been 65, I suppose when Ireland, I mean it’s going back to the business of what you do in a world. I mean something like that where people believed and trusted his word and you know, people believe the things that you say Theone because they trust you. Um, the only thing I can think is people who, uh, you just have to keep on at it. And in the hope that in the end people will realize the fraudulence of the claims that are made by people on Twitter, social media, the scare stories, there’s the racism, the, you know, the social attacks that are made, the, the viral nature of the things said about women. And I don’t know that in the end if enough people just keep on telling the truth as they can best see it being as objective as they can possibly be, which what CNN does, what the BBC does, what PBS does, what the big networks do. I think in America, what Fox I suspect doesn’t quite do that. If, if people, if enough people go on just saying, no, it’s not like that, then that’s the best you can do because you can’t slay these dragons. They’re not going to go away.

AMANPOUR:
David Dimbleby, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. And it was journalists who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein and launched the me too movement and now it was Weinstein’s rape trial does in fact continue in New York a new film. The assistant is examining the generally toxic workplace culture, which enables predatory behavior and vilifies those who speak up against it. The story tracks one day in the life of an assistant at a high pressure production company. Here’s a snippet.

“THE ASSISTANT”:
Entry level jobs in this industry are tough, but I can see that you’ve got what it takes. Say he’s in an important meeting. Initial here, sign there. Do I need to go here? Do you have a lawyer? I was worried for the score. What can we do to buy water?

AMANPOUR:
The assistant is director kitty Green’s latest project. She cut her teeth with hard hitting documentaries. Like Ukraine is not a brothel and casting JonBenet which looks at issues facing women in the world today. And she joined me from New York. Kitty green. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So this has got a huge amount of buzz. Your film and you’ve, you’ve taken it on, I think it’s the very first feature film to discuss this particular issue in the wake of me too. In the wake of the sort of now ongoing criminal trial of Harvey Weinstein. What was it that made you want to do this film now? What, what, what sort of triggered your antenna?

KITTY GREEN:
Um, I started off making a film about consent and power on college campuses and I, when the Weinstein story broke, I shifted focus cause I had a lot of friends that worked in the industry and had been, had had experiences that were similar to what I was reading in the press. So I, yeah, I guess I was interesting exploring the broader system and machinery around these men as opposed to kind of really delving into the predators themselves. Well because I think you’ve said, and I think a lot of people said it’s not just Harvey Weinstein and it’s not just the men, it is the entire enabling system and it is across Jack just about every industry. Is that what you found in your interviewing and research for this? For this film? Yes, completely. I mean, if the problem was Harvey Weinstein, it would be fixed already. But so we need to really kind of, I felt like we need to examine it all and like instead of looking at it top down, let’s look at it bottom up, let’s look at why we don’t have enough women kind of entering the film industry in the first place, being promoted from assistant to the next level up or to an executive position. So yeah, I think a thorough investigation is what’s needed. And so that’s where I started.

AMANPOUR:
And we’ll see throughout the film. But there is a sort of a culture of silence, not just manifested in your film, but we know around this problem and for so long women haven’t dared come come forward for all the reasons we know why. But I’m really interested about whether you chose to portray that in your film, which is a very, it’s called a very quiet film. Um, you have music like track only at the beginning and at the very end of the day in which this film on on folds. Was that specifically to connote the silence?

KITTY GREEN:
Definitely. We were, it was, I wanted really to have an authentic day for her, so I didn’t want to fill it with music. I really wanted to fill it with kind of the office sounds, you know, the third 30 copiers and the coffee makers. But definitely the culture of silence. I mean she has a lot of people around her and none of them are talking about what’s going on and yet they all find it a little disconcerting. So that was something, yes, we dive into a lot. So interestingly you also you, you kind of, you know this, this realization creeps upon you and the viewer based on the tasks you at the, you know, lower end of the pecking order have to do is the assistant just give us a few ideas of, of the kind of menial tasks you had to do that suddenly made you realize that something was afoot here. I was particularly interested in what I heard from a lot of people, which is about agenda, division of labor. So often the female assistants would have to take care of the children or buy the lunches or make the coffee. While the male assistants would be able to, you know, take more phone calls and sit in on meetings. So I did kind of hone in on those kinds of tasks. Um, but yeah, she does everything. She runs the gamut. A lot of photocopying, a lot of making booking travel and yeah, she’s cleaning yes. Cleaning up the couch and cleaning up the floor and yeah, that’s, and there’s some trick, there’s some very difficult and delicate stuff in his film. I mean, the idea of when we’re talking about complicity, people are kind of, I don’t think she’s a willing participant in any of this. She’s unwillingly becoming complicit over time through these tiny little tasks cause she’s only getting smaller bits of information and not, doesn’t really have the full story. So yeah, those tiny little things like picking up an earring off the floor and finding that a little strange was really important in the structure of the movie.

AMANPOUR:
The, you know, elephant in the room theme that you just cannot get away from is that this is a big movie producer with predatory habits and instincts AKA Harvey Weinstein, who’s currently on trial. But you say it’s not him and you do not show the producer. I’m fascinated by that idea. Tell me how you conjure up this predatory character without ever showing him.

KITTY GREEN:
Well, I, the thinking was that bad men have had enough screen time. So I tried to avoid showing him completely. Um, there is a sense of, you can hear his voice, his body passes the camera once or twice. And I think I did want to show his power over that place over that organization, but I really wanted to center women in the narrative and make it a woman’s story. So that became the thinking. You do have him on the phone because the character who plays the assistant, the actress who plays the assistant in the film does actually talk to the producer and is quite chilling in parts.

KITTY GREEN:
Hmm. Yes. Yes. We recorded, I mean I was originally not going to have his voice in it at all, but Julia Ghana, who plays the lead character has such an amazing face and you really need to be, it’s great to be really up close kind of. There’s so much going on. So, and to do that, if you, she’s got a phone, she’s holding a phone to her ear, you kind of need to hear the voice kind of rumbling out. So we did a lot of that in post production, recorded the voice of the boss and played around with what he could say.

AMANPOUR:
Okay. So the assistant has been asked to do all sorts of menial tasks and including, as you say, tasks that uh, maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t know are kind of facilitating the meat market, if I might put it that way. Uh, and this one clip is about how she’s kind of twigged that she’s being asked to put a new recruit up at a very fancy Manhattan hotel. Here’s the clip.

“THE ASSISTANT”:
Hi. What address do you have? Okay. Uh, hang on, right? I’m not sure what happened there. I’m sorry. Who? Okay. Let me check on that. I’ll get back to you how she starts today. Hey, there’s a call waiting at reception. She says that she’s supposed to start here today, working here with us. Where’s she from? Where’s she from? Idaho. Idaho, Idaho. Is that the one you met in sun Valley? Oh her. She’s been here before a few times. Send her in.

AMANPOUR:
So I mean you really do see just in that small clip how this, the system, like everybody around is also facilitating this behavior. What happens to this new recruit? Why did you choose to focus on her? What and what does the assistant do about it?

KITTY GREEN:
I guess I was looking at, I mean I interviewed a lot of people in the research process who’d worked for companies that had a predatory man at the helm and they often told stories of women appearing and them not really understanding what they were doing there and why they were there and having to sort of look after these women without really completely knowing what out, how to treat them or what’s going on. So I did that was part of that became kind of one of the biggest storylines in the film.

AMANPOUR:
You premiered this in and basically to a room full of the very people who you are talking about critically in your film. So just first and foremost, what was the reaction in the room? And subsequently in screenings by producers, by other coworkers or people who are part of the machinery that has kind of sustained this behavior.

KITTY GREEN:
Yeah, it’s interesting. It gets very different reactions from very different people. I think a lot of the men get very uncomfortable, sort of find it very uncomfortable. I think it is shining a light on behaviors that we’ve allowed to kind of continue for a very long time that’s hurting sideline women. So I guess I do get it. There’s a bit of discomfort, but I think that’s a good thing cause the change doesn’t come about without a bit of discomfort. And I also get a lot of women who want to kind of grab my arm and thank me and just they see themselves in the character and they haven’t seen a depiction of someone in that position, that kind of position without any power on screen before. So yeah, it’s been kind of an amazing experience to screen it in Sundance.

AMANPOUR:
So you talked about the reaction from some of the men, you know, they, they, they’re interested, they see that it’s a sort of a new look at them. And at the end, at their office culture. Did anybody say to you, Oh my gosh, you know, I need to do something different. I need to treat people differently. I need to offer better jobs to the women or whatever. Did, did you get a sense that even lip service was being paid to you or to the subject by the people? The very powerful people who, who’ve seen it now?

KITTY GREEN:
Definitely. We had a lot of people who are bosses of companies who came out a little rattled and are sort of thinking, I spent whatever. A friend of mine who’s a filmmaker took a couple of weeks to respond, but I knew they’d seen it and I was thinking, why aren’t they responding? They’re normally pretty truthful and I got this weird email saying, Oh my God, I’m feeling so guilty. I have all these assistants. They’re doing too much for me. I’m kind of wrestling with the subject matter and I think that’s a great thing if people can kind of reevaluate the way they treat their employees, the way they kind of, the way they kind of operate in their workspaces is that that’s the goal for us. So let’s get back to the central theme. A storyline of your movie. You then, or the assistant rather in the movie, takes the complaints to HR. Um, was it the specific complaint about the Idaho girl being put up in a hotel room? Yes. She had some concerns over some things she’d seen during the day, but the interesting thing is she didn’t really have enough information to make a clear case, so she wasn’t behind that door close. She doesn’t know what’s going on behind that closed door. Right. So she can kind of only present the dots and not join them.

AMANPOUR:
Okay. So I’m going to play the clip and we’ll see. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll see what presenting the dots are not joining them does for her.

“THE ASSISTANT”:
What’s your plan? Sorry? Where do you want to be in five to 10 years? Oh uh, I, I want to produce, I want to be a producer. Did you put some, okay, that’s excellent. We could use more women producers. You know, that’s, it’s a tough job, but I can see that you’ve got what it takes. Thanks. So why are you in here trying to throw it all away?

AMANPOUR:
Oh, yowzer. So he’s pretending to be sympathetic. Then he’s basically saying, you know, which is the age old way to brush it off. You’re going to ruin your career. I’m going to ruin your career for you. You’ll never work in this town again. I mean that was that conversation based on what you had heard in your interviews of assistants?

KITTY GREEN:
Yes, definitely. A lot of people went to HR in order to voice their concerns and realize that the HR is really there to protect the company and not the employees. So we’re quickly kind of spit out the other end and like not taken seriously. And, and I mean this is, it’s an example of gaslighting as well. He really makes her doubt herself and her intentions and what she’s seen. Um, but yeah, we were looking for all these kind of concrete examples of this system that is structured against women.

AMANPOUR:
So tell me about why you decided to do this. What was the sort of trigger point, um, that you thought, well, what I could make a feature film because most of your work has been very feminist oriented, but, but in the documentary of field, uh, so far most of the work that’s well known, why did you decide and how did you decide to make this leap into feature and on this issue?

KITTY GREEN:
I feel like there’s a lot, there’s been a lot of coverage in the media. There’s been a lot of facts written up and then there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of stuff out there about assistance and what their duties were for these men. Um, but what I was interested in was getting an audience to emotionally identify with this character, put really squarely putting them in her shoes. Cause I think often the, the word enablers gets thrown around this idea that, Oh, she’s, she’s such a horrible person. And I wanted to kind of correct that and explain the kind of complexity of the situation she’s in. She has no power and she’s stuck within kind of this machinery. So that became really important, that emotional identification.

AMANPOUR:
Okay. Describe a little bit, I mean, of your own situation, like you are on a film set, you’re a director, you know you’re in charge. Um, how do people treat you? Um, whether they’re actors or, or, or I don’t know, writers or whoever it might be who comes in, doesn’t quite know who’s who.

KITTY GREEN:
Yeah, I mean I’ve been on the film festival second for 10 years and I don’t, I guess people never assume I’m the director. People always walk in and hand me their coat and assume I’m the assistant. So I was getting very frustrated with that. I was also getting like a lot of questions whenever I went to Sundance a few years ago and immediately people asked me, who gives me my ideas? Is it James or Scott? And then my two male producers, and I thought, what you never ask a male director that. So I was getting it there. It’s really frustrating and I think in order to change the system, we can’t just get rid of the few kind of bad apples. We need to really kind of strip it all apart and try and get more women into the film industry and that hopefully will change things for the better.

AMANPOUR:
When is this film set? Is it set in the mad men era? Is it set in the post Harvey Weinstein era? Me Too era? What is the setting for your film? Your fictional film?

KITTY GREEN:
It’s pre the rise of the me too movement. I’d say it’s before people really had an Avenue or a pathway or a space to chat about misconduct. I think things have changed a little, but there’s still a lot of, a lot of the behaviors in the film you can still see exist today. So I think it’s important to still have these conversations.

AMANPOUR:
How, how have you reacted to the reaction? What would you say has been the overwhelming reaction? Has anything surprised you?

KITTY GREEN:
Um, I mean, I had one woman in, in salt Lake city who worked for a yacht company and she said that she thought that character was her and really identified with her, which is kind of amazing, this idea that it isn’t just about the film industry, but it’s transferable to any workplace and anyone who’s ever worked in an office or a workplace where that didn’t take them seriously. So that’s been a really kind of wonderful experience. And just to be clear, you did work in such a workplace in terms of being an assistant, but you didn’t necessarily have such negative experience, right? Yeah. I was at the ABC, the Australian broadcasting company, and I was in the, an edit assistant, so I press record on all the machines and um, but I, I, it was a very kind of safe and positive environment, but I did you still, there is a lot of three scary to be the youngest person in the office. I guess. It’s very, you do feel powerless in, in, and, yeah. So I understand the character completely.

AMANPOUR:
Well, good luck to you. As I said, has had a lot of good reviews. Everybody’s talking about it. A very timely movie. Kitty Green, thank you very much indeed.

KITTY GREEN:
Oh, thanks for having me.

AMANPOUR:
And now we turn to another vital issue of our time that’s in the spotlight. Petra Costa’s film. The edge of democracy is nominated for best documentary at the Oscars. It is an intimate look at the rise and fall of former Brazilian president, Luis Inacio, Lula de silver, and Dilma Rousseff. The current president, Julia Ball Sinero, who’s also featured, has called Costa’s hard-hitting doc, a work of fiction. Petro Costa joined our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the danger to democracy in her home country right now.

SREENIVASAN:
So for people who might’ve only heard the title in the context of an Oscar nomination, congratulations, by the way, what’s “The Edge of Democracy” about?

PETRA COSTA:
The edge of democracy is about my search to understand the seat of fascism that I saw growing in the streets of Brazil one day went to film a protest believing that it was just a protest asking for Domos impeachment. But I saw people asking for the return of the military dictatorship, a dictatorship that my parents had spent their lifetime fighting against and that had tortured and killed hundreds and thousands of people. And I believe that I was born at a time of democracy and that democracy was my birthright. So the film was about that shock of finding the seat of fascism and, but I then go and document the entire impeachment process of Dilma the imprisonment of Lula, the most popular president in Brazil’s history and the election of far right. President Bolsonaro. In this film, you’re also highlighting, you know, in your own family, there’s a gap wider in the Amazon river here on how you guys have gotten to be where you are, what you believe. Uh, tell us about that. My grandfather founded a construction company in Brazil that grew, uh, during the military dictatorship. Uh, the military dictatorship came to power through a coup or crew that he supported and thought was positive because of a fear at the time of the cold war and the threat of communism. While my parents became, uh, progressive in the 60s, broke off from the family, went underground and started fighting against that same dictatorship. And so that created a huge division inside the family that was kind of forgotten during the time that, that dictatorship ended and democracy began. Brazil decided to forget all the crimes committed by the dictatorship, by the dictators and by the people who are resisting. And, and that forgetfulness, I think is at the root of what we’re seeing repeat right now.

SREENIVASAN:
A good chunk of your film is about, uh, Dilma Rousseff. Uh, let’s go ahead and introduce our audience to just a clip of that.

PETRA COSTA:
Here. Lula is presenting his anointed successor Juma, who said Juma was a former guerrilla fighters prison during the dictatorship. In this picture, she’s being questioned after 22 days of torture while her interrogators had their faces, she sits upon.

SREENIVASAN:
The connection between your family and her is what?

PETRA COSTA:
Well, my mother and Douma had never met. But when Dilma was elected, my mother made a list of 20 things they had in common. They were born in the same city. They went to the same schools, they were imprisoned in the same prison. And the list goes on. But when I met DOMA, I tried to an formal interview, the first interview we had to ask her about her time, eh, during the dictatorship and the fact that she was tortured her resistance. And I felt that I couldn’t access her. And, and so I had the idea of bringing my mother to meet her and seeing what would come from that meeting. And it was quite powerful. She sees someone that went through so many things that she went through. And at that moment she actually confesses that she’d never wanted to be a president yet.

SREENIVASAN:
What is the significance of her and her impeachment and what happened in the process that she went through?

PETRA COSTA:
Yes. Well, impeachment is a very complicated law, right. And invented in the UK than adopted in the U S and Brazil copied it from the U S and you have to reach a level of crime, which are the high crimes and misdemeanors too, for crap for that crime to be considered. Impeachable that did not, was not the case with Dilma as many people agree because her, she was impeached for a technicality that does not rise to that level while with Trump, what the crime that he is accused of hits the heart of why the impeachment law was created, which is to prevent this type of abuse of power interference of a foreign nation in the national election. However, the fact that she could be impeached and she was impeached and he might not be impeached, shows the fragility of this law and how it can be used for political interests. And what I take out of this is the idea that it’s not the constitution that protects our democracy because the constitution can be so easily abused and misused, but to unwritten norms, which are self control and mutual respect that we’re losing more and more, uh, in democracies worldwide.

SREENIVASAN:
One of the other central characters is Lula, uh, as you said, one of the most popular politicians ever in Brazil. He was now in prison for a year and a half. Right. Uh, you spoke to him after he got out. What’s he like now? What’s he learned?

PETRA COSTA:
He said that his main regret is not to have reformed the institutions, to not have understood that Brazilian democracy was so fragile and believed that the institutions were healthy enough and realized that they weren’t, especially the judiciary.

SREENIVASAN:
There were multiple kinds of scandals that happened throughout the time you were filming this. And one of the ones that at least Americans have kind of superficially heard of is called carwash. What is that about? What happened?

PETRA COSTA:
So carwash was the greatest corruption investigation in Brazil’s history that uncovered, uh, uh, systemic corruption that had been happening for decades between companies, construction companies, and, and the national oil company and political parties. So they were paying, they were bribing political parties and people, they were financing their campaigns, their electro camp illegally financing because lobbying is illegal in Brazil. Electoral campaigns in exchange for contracts.

SREENIVASAN:
Were you supportive of Delmont and Lula when you were making this film?

PETRA COSTA:
I was critical and at, at parts supportive both. It was a, I mean, I, I think DOMA and Lula made so many concessions. Lula could have taken advantage at the top of the time that he had 87% approval rate to do the really necessary reforms that Brazilian political system needs to become functional again or to punish the crimes committed by the dictatorship and things of that such, but they did not, um, do that. And instead of gaining more and more, uh, power in the sense of engaging more and more of people’s dreams was the contrary. It was more and more concession. So in the end you were supporting not to have someone worse, but it wasn’t engaging into our imaginary, in our ideals of what we wanted, uh, a political party to represent us, you know. So

SREENIVASAN:
How much of their crimes are legitimate and how much were political constructs against them?

PETRA COSTA:
Well, the imprisonment of ruler I find I’ve had a very hard time finding any evidence that makes it the case for him to be in prison or for him to have been in prison. It’s based on the accusation of an apartment where he never went. I mean, he went there once, he never stepped in it, slept in, it, didn’t have the keep to it. And from there to accuse him of being the master general of carwash, which is what the accusation is, seems very unfounded. And international jurors say the same. Um, with Dilma also the crime that was the accusation that led to her impeachment was a, uh, technical, uh, budget maneuvering to hide deficit, which is not, which is a practice that many presidents did before. She did it to a higher degree, but still does not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. So independent of one’s interpretations. The rule of law, uh, in both cases seems to have been abused. And I think it’s at the heart of the huge erosion that happened in the, in Brazilian democracy.

SREENIVASAN:
And here we are now in a post Dilma post world. Where are your bolts and aro has one. What did he tap into? What did he understand about the Brazilian public and what they were feeling?

PETRA COSTA:
Well, the fact that he had not run for an executive, uh, space or office, he was not involved in the carwash scandal because, uh, if he had run for mayor, it was an outsider, wasn’t, yeah. And so people saw in him someone outside, uh, the scandal that had contaminated, uh, Brazilian, uh, the visiting political system. And also he tapped into the, like there’s been a heighten homicide rate in Brazil and he promised that he would, um, kill, uh, criminals and also a huge evangelical wave that has been against, uh, gay rights, feminism, uh, people of color. So all these kind of far right ideals that have been growing in Brazilian society as well. And he carries that flag. I mean, he says and does the right, yes. Since he was elected, the rate of homicides that the police has carried out in Rio has gone up by 20% and Rio has more people killed by the police that in the entire United States, usually people of color, the city of Rio has more people in the state of Rio. The state of Rio has more deaths by police than all in the United States. Yes. Which is really shocking. It’s a genocide of black Brazilians that is happening in Rio every year and also has incentivized farmers and loggers to invade indigenous reserves burn and deforest the Amazon, which is already at a tipping point where it can become a Savannah at any moment. And that would be tragic for the entire world as well as attacked. Uh, the arts censoring works of art that have LGBTQ plus content that talk about the dictatorship as a dictatorship and things of that site.

SREENIVASAN:
You know, in a, a recent op-ed in the New York times, you also mentioned, uh, really the rise of disinformation is part of his success. You said over 98% of his electorate was exposed to one or more fake news headlines during the campaign. And nearly 90% of his supporters believed they were true. When you were watching this as a Brazilian, this election, the run up to the election and how the most popular stories that people were reading were just outright fake. What was going through your mind?

PETRA COSTA:
It was so strange because this had never happened before and I mean to this extent, and it happened two to three days before the election and no one knew there was a wave in both, another grew exponentially and suddenly, uh, the workers party started to receive like messages of is this true? And, and the, the questions were, is it true that our dodgy the worker’s party candidate, is it true that his vice president is doing satanic rituals? Is it true that she has a baby from devil? Like things that are of that level of surrealism, that many resilience, we’re believing and we’re changing their votes in the last minute because of these fake news. And what was surprising and which was revealed the right after bill Sonata’s election was that these fake news, uh, were being, were being sent through WhatsApp messages that were paid from several private companies in Brazil that were interested in both Bernardo’s victory.

SREENIVASAN:
So it really gets back to that corporate top corporate Foxy that you are talking about. Right. So essentially that even though one of his claims was, I’m not part of this corruption, his campaign benefited from the influence that these corporations still had in the process.

PETRA COSTA:
Yes. Even though, uh, this had been forbidden just before this election and, and so it was the first election that we would have that was, would be rid of corporate interests, but they managed to find this loophole and, and influence dramatically in the result of the election.

SREENIVASAN:
Parts of this film are also, um, will be pretty familiar to people here in the U S uh, we’ve got, uh, another clip of kind of how sentiments shift on the streets.

PETRA COSTA:
These were the first images I film by deafness or blinds. It was my first contact with this unrest. It left me asking so that a boy and a girl have to be removed from a protest just because they’re wearing the color red from this point on the country divided into two irreconcilable parts. [inaudible]

SREENIVASAN:
How deep are these divisions in Brazilian society? If you wear the wrong color, so to speak, and are supporting the other party?

PETRA COSTA:
It was not like this until 2013 in Brazil, it was almost taboo to identify yourself as right-wing because of the trauma of the dictatorship. But in 2013, as I shown the film, there were protest that started for progressive reasons, uh, against the rise in the bus fare. But very rapidly through influence of social media started to become a far right and ended up culminating in the election of Bolsa now two years later. So a lot of what happened had a lot of influence from social media these far right groups that started to appear that were getting promotions and being paid. Um, one of them has even been funded a little bit by the Koch brothers and promoting, uh, thoughts like that, that like things such as the return of supporting the return of the military dictatorship and asking for Domos impeachment. Even before there was right after she was elected, even before there was an idea of what crime they were going to accuse her of.

SREENIVASAN:
Do you feel any danger being a film maker behind this living in a country that’s being run by mr Bolson aro now?

PETRA COSTA:
Well, I just hope that we will return to better times.

SREENIVASAN:
All right. The film is called “The Edge of Democracy.” Petra Costa. Thanks so much.

PETRA COSTA:
Thank you.

AMANPOUR:
And “The Edge of Democracy” is on Netflix now and that’s it for our program tonight. Find out what’s coming up on the show by signing up for our daily preview. Visit pbs.org/amanpour thank you for watching. I’m a porn company and join us again next time.