Mink! by Ben Proudfoot
Last week, Oscar-winning Canadian documentary maker Ben Proudfoot [whose Queen Of Basketball won the Academy Award for Short Doc in 2022] was on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, showing his short film Mink! to an audience of politicians including the soon to step down House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judy Chu, the first Chinese-American woman elected to Congress.
The 20-minute doc tells the remarkable story of Patsy Mink, a Japanese-American from Hawaii who was behind the passing of “Title IX” in 1972, a groundbreaking piece of legislation which banned sex discrimination in education programmes. The law is credited with giving new opportunities in sport to generations of American women – one reason why tennis superstar Naomi Osaka exec-produced the film.
“It was absolutely a highlight of my life and career,” Proudfoot enthuses about the screening. He was able to introduce Pelosi to Osaka. Many of Mink’s family members, friends and colleagues were in the audience.
Mink! is one of two new Proudfoot docs available on the New York Times platform and in contention for Oscars. The other is The Best Chef In The World, about pioneering Californian chef, Sally Schmitt, the original founder of the revered restaurant, The French Laundry.
“Sally and Patsy are obviously both amazing, all-American women who I think should be far more famous than they are,” Proudfoot says of the obvious similarities between the subjects of the two films, both made through Breakwater Studios, the company he founded in 2012. “But they’re very different people. Their journeys are different.”
Thanks to Proudfoot, the two women may now enjoy a level of recognition that has been denied them in the past.
Sally Schmitt, in particular, has not always been given her dues. The chef, who died earlier this year, was far less well-known than the charismatic chef Thomas Keller who took over The French Laundry when she sold it to him. However, she was never bothered by the lack of accolades. She worked hard, cooked well, and delighted in her family. As she makes clear in her on-screen interview with Proudfoot, she felt she had had a thoroughly fulfilling life.
“What she expressed about her career was so profound to me. I finished the film in the wake of winning the Academy Award. Also, I interviewed Sally a few days after my father passed away. He was a workaholic and he died early at 66. I watched him work 16 or 17-hour days, which he definitely drilled into me was the way to do it, and I think he died with a lot of regret that he had mismanaged and mis-proportioned his time and energy.”
Speaking to Sally convinced Proudfoot that awards and recognition don’t really mean that much in the scheme of things. “It really doesn’t matter how much kudos you have or money you accumulate. At the end of the day, we just have this brief dash of time and it’s all about your relationships,” the director says of the lessons he took from Schmitt. “You have to prioritise the people in your life – your family and friends – if you really want to drink life to the lees.”
In his own career, Proudfoot has achieved an astonishing amount in a short period of time. He came “sprinting out of college” with the aim to “make as many films as possible.” Now, still in his 30s, he is becoming more reflective about his work. He has a garden now and thinks about family as well as career. He’s still a showman, though. Proudfoot was a brilliant junior magician before he became a filmmaker.
Is there any overlap between conjuring and documentary? The director ponders the question, eventually answering that both are about engaging with the audience. “A magician sits there and imagines what feeling and what astonishment do they want to bring to the audience and reverse engineers what they can do with a deck of cards or a coin in order to achieve that…short documentary is the same way. You have a story or a person or an outcome that you’re looking to spring into the mind and heart of the audience.”
Proudfoot is looking to “delight” viewers with his films. He remains a subscriber to the “short is beautiful” approach to docs and rails against the “primal” idea that ”bigger is better.”
“I just don’t buy into any of it. It is also just like a huge cash grab,” Proudfoot complains about the “tyranny” of feature docs. “There are so many excellent documentary filmmakers who are making incredible work in the feature space but, honestly, so much of it is simply folks trying to make a lot of money in a system that is transforming the business and trying to take up as much of people’s time as is humanly possible. That is the goal of the streamers – to take up as much time as possible, and documentary happens to be the cheapest way to do that. If you take a murder case and sprawl it out and water it down and bloat it up to 10 hours, that’s the way you’re going to make the most money!”
By contrast, short films “respect” the audience’s time. They have a brevity and formal elegance that baggy series and features can’t match.
Ask the director about his filmmaking influences and he cites Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. In documentary, he has been most inspired by Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line. That’s because Morris uses all the “tricks” available to him to engage and entertain viewers. “What I loved about Errol was that he said this is art. You should be able to do whatever you what…why can’t we bring dramatisation and big music and all the tricks we’ve developed over the last 100 years of cinema and apply it to a non-fiction story? I love that. What I’ve tried to do is take it a step further and take all of the techniques and best tools we have as filmmakers and not only apply it to a non-fiction story but to people you would never think to apply it to.’
The subjects of Proudfoot’s films tend to be “under-appreciated people” whose stories have never been told properly before. He makes films about the “almost famous,” not those who are already basking in success and celebrity.
Both of Proudfoot’s new documentaries are based around probing, thoughtful interviews. In The Best Chef In The World, Sally Schmitt is seen in big close-up, talking about how she set up The French Laundry and about her principles for “Californian cuisine.” Patsy Mink died 20 years ago, but her daughter Wendy describes in great depth the challenges she overcame.
What is the secret of a good interview? According to Proudfoot, it’s remarkably simple.
“Number one is having genuine interest and curiosity about every element of that person’s life,” the director reflects. “You have to allow time for the story to unfold and you have to start from the beginning. The first question I ask someone when I interview them is what is your first memory – and then we go from there, in chronological order, and if it takes 12 hours, it takes 12 hours!”
