'Big Men' Director Rachel Boynton on the Complex World of Petro-Politics

Filmmaker Rachel Boynton takes on a monolith of a subject in her documentary Big Men, submerging herself in the world of the oil industry as Kosmos Energy, a US-based oil company, discovers an oil field off the coast of Ghana—the first such discovery in that country's history. Suddenly, the question "Who gets what?" is on everyone's mind and the vying for the resource begins. In an analogous situation in Nigeria, the discovery of oil in 1956 has, over the past several years, left many communities in a mercurial lurch and oil companies unsure of pipe security. Boynton is determined to find out if Ghana would endure the same fate as Nigeria.

Viewers looking for an oil documentary with clear heroes and villains will be disappointed; Boynton does not judge her subjects, but shows their stories and characters as they are, doing justice to the multifaceted, complex and undeniably human conflict. She takes viewers on an expedition into rare territory for documentaries, interviewing everyone from militants in Nigeria to oil executives, politicians and activists to everyday citizens. Big Men is, at its heart, a story about capitalism and human nature. While those with means have a viable shot at profiting from Ghana's oil, what happens to those who receive the short end of economic inequality?

Documentary caught up with Boynton over the phone, and we discussed her research, the backup story that never aired, and the challenges she faced and the insights she gained during her eight-year journey of making Big Men.

Documentary:What was your research process for Big Men? Where did the idea for the film come from and where did you begin in your research?

Rachel Boynton: I finished a film called Our Brand Is Crisis back in 2005, and I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. At the time, oil prices were steadily climbing. In 2006, every five minutes on CNN there was something about the price of oil and how we were all going to hell in a hand basket, because we were running out of the stuff.

I've been interested in films that look at big ideas about how the world is today. And I thought the oil industry was ripe for a great documentary, because I've never seen anything about the oil business from inside the business. There are reasons for that. It's very hard to get into the oil business to make a movie, which I discovered as I went into it.

I started doing some research and I realized that the coast of West Africa was considered this new frontier for a lot of oil companies. I thought that could be an interesting setting for a film—deepwater exploration in particular.

Right around the end of 2005, there was this militancy that started popping up in the news out of Nigeria. Groups of young men were attacking pipelines, kidnapping oil workers and demanding more money for their region. Their attacks were causing world-wide oil prices to peak.

I thought that that would be a great backdrop for trying to find the right story. So I decided I would go to Nigeria and try to get access to an American oil company operating there. That was the original concept for the film.

I started in 2006, and spent a year and half travelling back and forth, particularly to Nigeria. That's where most of my research took place. I was trying to meet the people I needed to meet in order to guarantee our safety during the trip and get access to all the various people in the film. It took a lot of work because I didn't know anyone when this started.

D: In Big Men, you were able to access a wide range of entities that are seemingly off-limits, from a board meeting at The Blackstone Group to the jungle headquarters of a militant group. In a previous interview you said you gained access to Kosmos Energy with a Powerpoint, but how were you able to get access to other groups such as the militants? How did you find the people to put you in connection with them?

RB:  It's important when you're doing something like this, that you have money to finance the initial trips. I spent, like I said, a year and a half travelling back and forth with no movie; I wasn't in production. I could never have made this film if I hadn't spent a year and a half doing nothing but walking around talking to people.

I met a guy in Nigeria who was basically my patron saint. He worked for an oil services company there and he allowed me to live in his guest bedroom.

That's hurdle number one: the money. Hurdle number two is, How do you go about meeting people you need to meet—especially when they're from such disparate worlds? I have a basic theory about that: the six degrees of separation theory. Everyone is connected to everybody else, especially when you're operating in what is essentially a very small world. The oil executives are connected to government heads, who are connected to the militant leaders. You're not going at it trying to get directly to the person you want to get to; you're going at it trying to get into the world of that person. And a big part of my initial work, particularly when it came to the oil world, was really about meeting people—any people—in the world of oil exploration and convincing them that I wasn't some scary, liberal-minded documentary filmmaker who was going to come in and trash the scene. I had a lot of work to do to convince them that I was interested in actually listening to what they had to say. And a lot of that was about forming relationships.

When I got on that first plane to Lagos, I had a few phone numbers and one of them was my husband's business partner's brother, who had gone to high school—boarding school—with a guy who was Nigerian. He was the guy who helped me get my first hotel room and basically arranged for a guy to pick me up from the airport, so I wasn't entirely by myself when I arrived. And he ultimately worked on a political campaign in the Niger Delta during an election cycle there. During that political campaign, because politics are very connected to the militancy—or at least were at the time—he met the wife of a very important militant leader. He introduced me to her, she introduced me to somebody else, who ultimately introduced me to the person I needed to know.

Militants in Delta State, Nigeria. Photo: Jonathan Furmanski 

You spend an enormous amount of time doing nothing, feeling incredibly frustrated and wishing you could be more productive. And if somebody says "No" to you, you come back and try again several months later. You have to have a vision in your mind that you're going to get it done. If one thing doesn't work, you have to figure out something else worth trying.

D: Was there anything you learned before production and during production that really surprised you?

RB: The thing I always go back to is, having spent as much time running around Nigeria as I did and then coming back to New York City—the two places couldn't be more different. That experience really ingrained in my mind a sense of my own privilege in a way that nothing else in my life really has. How many things in my world actually do work; how much the world can go awry and be impossibly difficult for people who live in circumstances where their society doesn't function like our society; how divided the world is by economic opportunity—those things you know intellectually, but it's very different to walk out into the world and get your feet in the muck of it and see what it is.

I think this all made me a lot more humble just as a person. It taught me how much I don't really know about the world.

D: Did you go in with any expectations for how things would turn out or how you would feel about your interviewees?

RB: I'm married to a fiction filmmaker. We spend a lot of time watching fiction and talking about scripts and analyzing story structure and things like that. Both Our Brand Is Crisis and Big Men have very traditional narrative structures in terms of a climax, a resolution and characters who go through something. The thing is, because it's reality, you don't know what the story's going to be when you're launching yourself into it. What you can do is pick circumstances that you think will result in a good story. In order to do that, you need to pick a circumstance where you know there's going to be conflict. And it was a pretty easy bet to say that in the development in the country's first oil field, somewhere in that scene, there's going to be conflict. This question of who's going to get what is there from the very beginning, even if everyone is acting super happy about what they've found.

I very purposely picked a subject matter that I thought would generate a narrative story structure. In Our Brand Is Crisis, I picked a campaign. There was no campaign [in Big Men], but I always knew I was going to try to follow the story arc through first oil and see what happened over the course of time.

Now, I had a backup plan. It could have happened that I followed Kosmos through first oil, everything was hunky dory, nothing went wrong—and then there would have been no conflict. So I had another story that I actually filmed that didn't make the movie. I filmed with the US Navy, in both Ghana and Nigeria as they were training local forces to better protect the oil wells off the coast. And if I had to, I could have constructed a film that was about more internationally oriented ideas rather than these micro-economic ideas, about what's happening to a particular company in this particular place.

D: Have you wanted to release that story?

RB: No, I want to move on with my life. I worked on this film for seven to eight years. I'm very ready to be done.

D: Did any of your interviewees have second thoughts about being in the film or the information they shared with you?

RB: I don't know. I think anyone who agrees to be in a film is interested in being acknowledged and seen. So I think the response to the movie often has to do with if they feel that they've been portrayed as they are and if they have the self-confidence to confront that and be okay with it. And the people in this film, like the oil guys, have all been really happy with the film; I think they feel like it presents them as they are. I showed it in Ghana and the one person who wasn't happy with the film was the Minister of Energy. He was not somebody I expected to be unhappy; I thought he came off quite well. But that just shows you that you can never really predict who's going to like something and who isn't.

D: Do you continue to stay in contact with any of your interviewees?

RB: I've been in contact with all the oil guys and the financial guys. [Venture capitalist] Jeffrey Harris is in New York, so I've seen him at several screenings. And I've been in touch with the guy from Ghana. I have not been in touch with the militants. For a long time I thought I was going to go to Nigeria and specifically show the movie to them, but I had such a complicated, difficult experience going to Ghana to show the film, that I decided that frankly, I didn't want to put myself in that position.

Filmmaker Rachel Boynton in Delta State, Nigeria. Photo: Jonathan Furmanski 

D: What made it difficult to show the film in Ghana?

RB: Well, I'm a white girl from New York City and I'm coming into a place and making a story of what I see. So Big Men is going to inherently have my perspective; it's not a Ghanaian perspective. I wish there were more African documentary filmmakers who were empowered and financed to go out and make big movies, because the world needs that and I imagine it's probably a pretty frustrating thing to look at your story as told by somebody who's not from your place, an outsider.

The majority of the Ghanaians who saw the film really liked it and appreciated it. The people who had trouble with it had very politicized or particular views of the situation, and didn't perceive the film as balanced. They perceived it as being pro oil company. That was never my intention and I don't see the film like that at all. There's not a tradition in Ghana of storytelling that tells both sides. There's more of a tradition of storytelling that tells one side. So if you include both sides, then both sides kind of say, You shouldn't be telling the other guy's side, and why are you doing that? So there's not the same space necessarily for different kinds of storytelling. But I was quite surprised that the Minister of Energy was as upset as he was, because I think he comes across in the film as a guy who keeps saying over and over, "I'm not doing this for myself, I'm doing this for the country. And what's wrong with trying to get a better deal if we're doing it for our people?"

D: What do you want viewers to take away from this film?

RB: For me, it's a film about capitalism. I grew up in time when there wasn't a whole lot of questioning of the system, in the sense that it was still the Cold War era and to question the basic outcomes of capitalism, they'd think you were a Red. And over the course of my life, I feel like—and maybe it's just my perspective has changed—but the income disparity I see in America and the world, I find very disturbing. And the concentration of enormous amount of wealth in the hands of a very few, I find very disturbing. I have no criticism of individuals who are in that world; I think a lot of them do great things with the money they make. But for me, questioning the essential values of the system is one of the big points of the movie.

But you want it to be a great movie with an exciting story that takes you into crazy worlds that you've never been in before. You want to have the thrill of the access to the militants, to the oil executives. You don't want it to be some polemic.

My hope for the film is that it will persist and that over time it will engage people and get them thinking. It really is fundamentally a film about capitalism and about how our world works—not in a way that's judging the characters of the film, not in a way that's looking at one group of people as good or bad, but it is posing an important question about the justice of that pursuit and what it entails and what it means for everybody involved in the film.

Big Men airs August 25 on PBS' POV.

Corinne Gaston is a writer, editor, activist and researcher originally from Pennsylvania. She is currently the deputy opinion editor of Neon Tommy and is finishing a degree in creative writing at USC.