Interview with John Douglas and Robert Kramer

From the booklet of Milestones.
Ginette Gervais & Gérard Lionet (Cannes, May 1975)

When you made the film, did you have very specific things to say, or did you let your friends say what they want?

We had a script, all the scenes were written. We would show a scene to a person who was going to play it: "What do you think? – Me? No! I wouldn't say that! – So what do you believe? What would you want to say?" From there, we struggled. I admit that sometimes I would have liked it to be different. For the scene between the doctor father and his draft dodger son, for example, we would have preferred a scene with lots of warmth between the two characters. But the actors had their own issues: the one playing the young man didn't like his father; the one playing the father didn't have a son, but had problems with his daughters. There was nothing we could do about this reality! People often say about editing that each element of a film has a life of its own, which is beyond our control. There is nothing unusual about the draft dodger being like that with his father: that's who he is, that's how cold and distant he is. All of this shapes the context of the film and sets the pace and atmosphere.

Is Milestones the film about the communes?

Yes, in a sense. During the 1960s, intergenerational tensions were very intense, there was a lot of conflict between young people and their parents. Because of this, we were cut off from our history, from the history of the United States. It was not part of our lives. We wanted to change the world, to overthrow class divisions, etc. Now we want to explore this history and learn from it, so we're studying American history, the history of the left in America. I don't think it's the same in France. We severed ties with all political parties. I knew nothing about the Communist Party, or the struggles in the 1930s during the Great Depression, etc. In the 1960s, we thought we were the center of the world, we believed we were the first to see these problems and fight them.

Where does this lack of curiosity about the Communist Party come from?

The Communist Party was very important in its day, but now it's just a wing of the Democratic Party with a revisionist and dogmatic stance. When I was at the heart of politics in the 1960s, I never heard a single good thing about the Communist Party. We didn't understand that every era calls for a different form of resistance; there were some really determined activists in the Communist Party, it's a complicated story with good and bad aspects. We don't know this history very well, but it's important to understand that a revolutionary struggle is the struggle of an entire people over many years. We need to understand history, because history is like blood. We want to show that people need to reconnect with their fathers; we're all in the same boat. It's very difficult because many people in the film haven't reached that point, like the draft dodger son and his doctor father.

When did your experience in communes start?

More than five years ago. We don't always stay in the same commune, but we always live with other people, with children, even if we move to another part of the United States, because this type of commune is everywhere. We started out as a collective of activists who work together all the time. Today I live with nine people and four children. We carry out political actions together and we live together because it's practical and because it pushes our responses and ideas in the direction we want. It's very difficult to live alone, it's expensive and it's not a good thing. I have a child and a girlfriend, but I don't want to have a family. This is essential in the film: the family is an ideology at the core of capitalism. We and many of our friends are very afraid of ending up in a family, with a dad, a mom, and children. It's difficult because in practice it's not always very clear and this raises questions in our work. Many people hover between living as a couple and as a small family, but we need to find other models.