In Dick Johnson is Dead, director Kirsten Johnson finds numerous and increasingly creative ways to bump off her beloved dad, just so she can keep bringing him back to life. She explains all to Business Doc Europe.
One of Kirsten Johnson’s profound regrets is that she captured her late mother too few times on camera, she says, and even when she did it was in later life when she was suffering from dementia.
This was never going to be the case with her dad Dick Johnson, a retired psychiatrist living in Seattle with as great a penchant for gallows humour as his doc-maker daughter. Kirsten wants to preserve Dick forever on celluloid and he is more than happy to comply, even if he has to die a few times in the process. She becomes, for all intents and purposes, a kind of benign one-person serial killer.
He is run over by a car (courtesy of a stuntman), gets bashed over the head by a falling home appliance (another stuntman), suffers a heart attack in the street and, in an inspired piece of grand guignol, is stabbed in the neck by a workman wielding a plank. Each time he dies, Kirsten calls ‘cut’ and Dick recovers, unscathed, beaming his usual smile, chuckling away, or showing an attitude of studied bemusement.
But in among all these deaths, there is real life to be lived and recorded, and not long after the camera starts rolling Dick himself begins to show signs of dementia. He moves from his expansive home in Seattle into Kirsten’s apartment in New York, where she lives with her two children. He is cherished and makes for a perfect house guest, but he takes to getting up at 3am fully dressed to go to his office, despite it being closed down and on the other side of the US. He performs poorly in memory tests and he is dissuaded from driving after an incident when he is unaware that the car he is driving has flat tyres. “I’m no longer your father,” he confesses to Kirsten at one point. “I’m your little brother.” And somebody who needs her ongoing care and devotion.
But there is a lot more on offer in a film that is replete with hilarious shocks, surprises and reversals. We see Dick in an animated Heaven sitting at a table full of luminaries (including Bruce Lee) and dancing uproariously with his wife. The grim flip-side is an equally stylised, Halloween-inspired Hell whose Room 101 opens up onto a care home full of shuffling geriatric folk.
After a shocking jump cut to a moving ambulance where we hear CPR being administered via defibrillator, we are then transported to an emotionally wrenching memorial service where Dick’s friends and family gather to eulogise on the enormity of their love and affection for him, both as friend and influence over their lives.
Director Kirsten reflects on how, when she was growing up, Dick was a great dad from whom she learned a lot about humour in all its shades of darkness. “He was a psychiatrist dealing with deadly serious things all the time, with psychosis and schizophrenia, Vietnam vets and refugees who almost drowned in the ocean – super serious,” she explains. “He loved Harold and Maud. I loved Groundhog Day. He introduced me to Charles Addams cartoons, so there was this love of laughter and absurdity, but it was right up against [this sense of] ‘ooh this world is cruel’.” She tells of how he once paused an episode of The Simpsons to answer the telephone and successfully persuade a patient to remove a noose from her neck, before re-joining Homer, Lisa and Bart et al, as well as his own astonished kids who had overheard the whole exchange.
Much of Kirsten’s previous work has been, she points out, immensely serious and dealing with tough subjects. In her 2016 Sundance winner Cameraperson, for example, she revisited traumatic interviews she had recorded over the past 25 years, in places such as Yemen, Bosnia and Afghanistan.
“I think I have deep respect for other people’s pain and suffering and I can’t play with that in the same way that I can attempt to do something different with my own pain and suffering,” says Johnson of her need to apply humour by the bucketload when making a film about her father. “Watching Cameraperson there is one laugh in it, maybe one and a half laughs, and I was just like ‘I’ve gotta make something funny’.”
Funny, yes, tactile too, and steeped in love throughout, one should add.
The director points out how her mother had considerable creative flair, a skilled photographer of landscapes with a love of the colour orange (that she herself inherited). This didn’t mean, however, that her dad was the fusty academic of the household. Quite the contrary. “We always thought of my mum as the visual person, and that my father was interested in the psychology of other people. But in fact as time goes on, we keep finding these wonderful photos of my mother, and it would be, like, who took it? And my dad took it. He was an incredible visual person too but he was modest about it, because it was my mother’s territory. But I actually think he would have been a great filmmaker.”
And how would Kirsten have fared in her father’s profession? “I went to college thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist and then of course the first biology course I took, and the bad grade I got, indicated that it was not the path for me,” she answers. “I’m a big talker, I love to talk, I love to have conversations but I learned on one of the very early films that I did (Derrida, 2002), that I could show what I was thinking through filming instead of through talking.”
Kirsten rarely refers to herself as the ‘director’, both in the film and in our interview, rather the ‘cameraperson’ (as per the eponymous title of her 2016 film). “I like the modesty of it. I think in this film I am many things. I am daughter, I am caregiver. I am camera person. I am director. I am so interested in collaboration, in acknowledging that cinema is a collaborative work,” she explains.
She expands on her answer by referencing the work of another DP on the film, John Russell Foster, who went off piste to capture the unforgettable moment during the memorial service when Dick’s best friend Ray Damazo breaks down at the side of the altar. “I am interested in trying to see what has been hidden, what has not been seen, those who have not been recognised, those who are invisible,” Kirsten stresses. “So I think about that in terms of a crew of people who are making a film together, [in] how I see and value every member.”
Dick Johnson is Dead is nominated in the Best Editing and Best Writing categories of the IDA Documentary Awards.
The film won Best Documentary Feature and Best Director at the 2020 Critics Choice Documentary Awards and the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Non-fiction Storytelling – 2020 Sundance Film Festival
A Netflix Original Documentary
A Big Mouth Productions filmed, produced and directed by Kirsten Johnson
Starring: Dick Johnson
Producers: Katy Chevigny, Marilyn Ness
Co-producer: Maureen A. Ryan
Executive producer: Megan Ellison
Editor: Nels Bangerter
Written by Nels Bangerter & Kirsten Johnson
Lighting DP: John Russell Foster
Multicam DP: Rick Siegel
Cinematographer: Nadia Hallgren
