In a follow-up to our review of the excellent new documentary HOMEGROWN: A Portrait of a Nation Divided, I spoke to the director, Michael Premo. It was a wide-ranging conversation about the film and the politics that led up to it.
Homegrown does a fantastic job of summarizing the lead-up to January 6th and the current politics of this country. The incredible access the filmmakers have to the subjects’ personal lives and thoughts tells us more than any number of front-page news articles could.
You can watch the film at https://homegrown.film right now.
Here is an edited version of the interview for clarity and time.
Michael Premo: My name is Michael Premo. I’m the director of Homegrown. I got into documentary film, particularly, because I had previously been working in radio and still photography, and I was really sort of attracted to its immediacy. I loved how documentary cinema gives us this opportunity to sort of complement the work of written journalists, which might work well with deeply sourced facts and figures, and where cinema can complement that by showing the emotional lives of individuals who are sort of behind the headlines. So that’s what really attracted me to the documentary.
Zach: Yeah. What one of the things that actually amazes me about this film, as, as somebody who also like, talks these guys regularly, unfortunately, is the access that you have and the kind of, I don’t know, about honesty is the right word, but the kind of openness that they have, to on camera, like, how did you how did you approach that?
Michael: Well, we started this film in 2018 because we knew that there was something bubbling in this country, and we wanted to sort of better understand what was motivating people to sort of get out from behind their keyboards and into the streets.
And that just prompted us to trying to go to as many rallies and protests and press conferences and meetups as we possibly could just to meet people. And we have a background of doing what might be called sort of participatory documentaries or collaborative documentaries, where you really recognize the people who are directly affected by something as the experts in their own experience.
And that’s what was our approach. We were just trying to understand honestly and earnestly why people are feel so aggrieved, what their grievances are, and what’s motivating them, and trying to peel back beneath all the rhetoric and ideology. And that I think, really allowed us to, get, get a level of access that was further sort of solidified by just spending time with people and allowing ourselves to develop relationships over many years, really with people, so we could just understand who they are and what they’re about.
Zach: What was the idea? Was it like the build-up to the 2020 election? Like, what was the concept originally that you were going for?
Michael: The concept really, really sort of matured in our heads in the lead-up to the 2016 election. And we increasingly saw people who were ready, willing, and able to use violence to fight for an America that they wanted there. And then we were we we saw it. For us, it was clear that there was this momentum gathering to something big. We spent enough time with social movements, understanding social movements, studying social movements, that sort of just kind of like read the tea leaves of energy. And what we saw was this coalescing of energy that was that was that we thought was unique.
It was profound. It was different historically. And we saw, in particularly across the conservative movement, there were all these different sort of factions and tendencies and communities of conservatives who have, kind of very different ideologies, different lineages who were finding alignment in a way that felt profound. And it was different that what I had seen, at least in my lifetime, or read or historically had occurred. And we knew that something was going to happen. Of course, we didn’t know that it would be January 6th. Well, we knew that that the only option would be for this sort of energy to explode in some way.
Zach: You were at Occupy Wall Street which was the lefts answer in a way to the Tea Party. How do you parse the idea that Trump ended up being the answer for a lot of people to all of that?
Michael: Yeah. I think there’s a couple things. I think one of them on a very basic, oversimplified level, is that Trump – his ability to like, say, there’s a problem, name the problem, and name the enemy, regardless of who if the accuracy of any of that, like his clarity of vision, is so clear. And that’s unique from politicians.
I think we live in an age where people across the political spectrum are so disillusioned because they feel like the political class and government is so captured by the corporations and billionaires, and they may not have language to sort of articulate why it is or how that works, or how it manifests itself in their daily life, but they know the system is rigged, not in their favor.
And we see this again and again. You know, one of the things that it was seemed like there was a catalyzing event in many people’s head was the bank bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis, where people were just mad that these banks got bailed out. And, you know, working people didn’t really get any relief. And so they feel like they need to do something about it.
Now, of course, what and why is, you know, it’s very but I think the other thing that like obstructs progressives and leftists ability to understand, the clarity that Trump is offering to people, a certain segment of people is that Trump is a perfect distillation of everything that many people in America pretend that America is not. And American exceptionalism so pervades the mind of Americans, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, that there is this sort of like notion that it can happen here, or this notion that distills what he’s talking about into like neat stereotypes, which are inaccurate.
And so I think they miss how clear and boisterous sort of Trump is. And they miss also that he’s offering a clear vision, like whether or not, you know, you can equivocate on if it’s an actual plan or not, which arguably it’s not. But he’s he’s like again and again, he’s like, here’s the problem, here’s the problem. And I’m going to fix it.
You know, compared to Hakeem Jeffries or folks who use you when they talk, I’m like, I don’t know what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah.
Zach: Literally nothing.
Michael: I do not know what those words mean together in a sentence.
Zach: What was it like editing down the conversations and rants of the far right people you followed?
Michael: Oh it was incredibly challenging. It’s 400 hours. We followed about, you know a dozen people around the country and you know, we had to make hard choices once we got into the edit around who would be in the film, and we chose people we felt were not only interesting and provocative on their own, but we felt like they were broadly representative of a whole sort of class of people that we had met through the course of our our reporting.
And that’s what we really tried to show with the film. Is that like, we try to dig down beneath all the rhetoric and the sort of like, you know, the short form, you know, the, the, the Twitterisms and ideology, just to understand the base of what is motivating people. And what we found is people looking for community, looking for power, looking for purpose, trying to, like, make sense and piece together a fractured world and that, I think, defies and transcends all the ideology, all the isms, all these sort of assumptions around these big ideas that drive people.
Because at the end of the day, as humans were driven by much more baser, much more basic instincts. And I think particularly, you know, when you think about authoritarianism and you think about people who are strategic, either strategically chiseling away at the legitimacy of democracy or just losing faith in it, whole cloth like these people are arriving at this because they’re just trying to make sense of their world, and then maybe they might find ideology, they might, like, be attracted to rhetoric.
And I think understanding that provides opportunities for organizing an intervention to sort of like present other alternatives to how we can organize society, other alternatives to like what the real problem is. Yeah.
Zach: Do you think there’s a way that the people in this film or even in the 30% of the country that are devoted to Trump can come back from this?
Michael: I don’t know about some of these certain individuals. Yeah, I know that that’s a hard thing to sort of imagine or to sort of think through, but I think the broader message, the broader idea is, yes, I think that ideas are fluid. I think. So, ironically, some of the biggest obstacles at this moment are just the fact that we have social media.
People feel like they plant their flags, and there’s this evidence of how they’ve planted their flags. But I think when you understand really, that many of these people, across the spectrum, the political spectrum, sort of like are in these ideological formations or groupings. Because more it’s a lifestyle choice. Like they found people that they’ve found community with, they found chosen family with and those bonds are far more profound than any of these sort of isms or ideologies.
And really, those bonds are what are sort of attracting people to movements and keep people, keep people in movement. And I think why the conservative movement in particular has grown to a mass movement. It’s because it’s open and inviting. And that might seem counterintuitive to progressives or are leftists, but, you know, many of these sort of, groups on the right, they are providing spaces outside of work and school where people can come together, talk about their problems in a way that isn’t there isn’t really shame in a way that there’s fun, you know, but like, you know, progressive spaces and left spaces are so plagued by sort of shame and sort of ideological purity that that isn’t sort of that I didn’t experience on, on the right. And so, because so many people who are looking for community and looking for meaning feel invited into those spaces, that is the thing that is harder for them to sort of shift away from. If you’re thinking about sort of exiting and exiting movement, it’s it’s not really about ideology, it’s about lifestyle and community and comfort.
And so when we think about that, I think to be able to sort of challenge that or sort of, help people sort of like move away from some of these more toxic, frameworks like, there needs to be invitations that are warm and inviting and fun and that doesn’t exist.
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