French director Yohan Guignard met the subject for his latest documentary, Random Patrol (which screened last month in the IDFA Competition for Short Documentary) in highly unusual fashion. Guignard had been travelling around the US, hitchhiking from town to town, his camera in tow.
“I was looking for some stories and characters. I was open to meeting new people,” the director recalls.
When he turned up in a place, Guignard would use the website Couchsurfing to find places to stay. One of his hosts was an Oklahoma City cop called Matt Hoffer.
“His story was that he was so depressed about his work that he decided to do Couchsurfing to force himself to meet other people,” says the director of the cop.
Hoffer spent much of his time driving around town on ‘random patrol.’
“I saw his big police car and I asked if I could go to film him for one day,” Guignard explains how he ended up on the passenger seat, filming some initial material.
Back in France, Guignard showed his footage of Hoffer to his producers. They all decided it would be a good idea to return to the US to make a film about him. This time round, Guignard spent two weeks with him.
Hoffer was emerging from depression. On patrol, he was sometimes surprisingly trigger happy. There’s a disconcerting moment in the movie in which Hoffer reaches instinctively for his gun as a stranger approaches his vehicle.
“I had the time to frame it and film that. I think he was also doing that for me,” Guignard reflects on the moment the cop drew his gun. “I knew he was also showing his paranoia through these situations.”
The film took place around a year before the George Floyd shooting. However, there was already strong debate around the role of cops in urban America. “He [Hoffer] was really on the defence. He was saying that, no, they [the police] were not all racists. He was telling me why everybody has to be armed…he was pro-Trump, pro-life and pro-guns.”
While editing the documentary, Guignard decided to keep the polemics about race, violence and the cops in the background. Instead, the film is shot entirely inside the car.
Why doesn’t the cop have a partner? The director explains that, in small suburban communities like his, police officers travel solo.
“I think he loves to be alone and he loves to be in his car,” Guignard says of Hoffer. “Just to be on random patrol, that is what he likes to do. And he is a kind of…cerebral man.”
Reflecting the subject’s personality, Guignard set out to make a “minimalist” movie with an existential feel. “When we are in the car, it is like we are in his head. I thought it would be beautiful to use the car as his own mind.”
Occasionally, Hoffer would meet another cop on the road. Then they’d draw up their cars together and “talk and laugh” through the open windows. Then, they’d drive off again, resuming their own solitary quests.
The director had about 40 hours of material but felt the documentary would be stronger as a short than a feature.
Random Patrol was produced by Paris-based L’Endroit. The doc premiered at Cinéma Du Reel where it won the Short Film award. It also screened in the US at Flickers, the Rhode Island International Film Festival, this time winning an editing prize.
Yes, Hoffer has seen the film. At first, he wasn’t sure about it. He found it strange to watch himself on screen. However, his new wife, whom he met through Couchsurfing, was a fan. If she liked it, he eventually decided, so did he.
These days, Hoffer is no longer in the police force. He retired a few weeks ago and his new plan, pandemic permitting, is to tour the world with his wife – and maybe to stop off in France en route to visit Guignard.
The director himself has various other projects on the boil including some TV documentaries. One, Young Shepherds, is about three youngsters from a non-farming background learning how to work with sheep. Another is set in a convent and is looking at the everyday lives of a group of nuns. The director is also continuing to prepare a feature film which he will co-direct with a Syrian filmmaker who kept video diaries in Damascus during a period of extreme violence and upheaval.
