Beautiful and Beastly: 'The Matador' Captures a Cultural Ritual

The Matador, which opened October 31 in New York through City Lights Pictures and will continue its theatrical roll-out to selected theaters across the country through December, looks at the long, at once exalted and reviled tradition of bullfighting through the story of one of its youngest and most charismatic stars, David Fandila. Journalist/photographer Stephen Higgins saw his first bullfight in Mexico in 1997, and following a photo shoot at a bullfighting school in California five years later, saw the cinematic potential in the sport cum spectacle. Over the next three years, and through various connections, Higgins and his crew traveled to Spain to follow Fandila. Higgins then brought the footage in Fall 2005 to Washington, DC-based docmaker and educator Nina Gilden Seavey, and over the next two years they hammered out The Matador, which premiered at SXSW 2008 last March and subsequently screened as part of IDA's DocuWeek last August.

As a follow-up, of sorts, to the DocuWeek Q&A we conducted with Higgins and Seavey, we continue our conversation about moral conundrum of bullfighting and the long process of bringing The Matador to the screen.

Stephen Higgins, director/producer of The Matador. Courtesy of City Lights Pictures

IDA: Stephen, The Matador is your first film, and your primary métier is photography. Although you employed two cinematographers on the film, you were the director. Talk about what kind of skills and sensibilities were most transferable from photography to filmmaking. What did you find most challenging in making that transition from photographer to filmmaker?

Stephen Higgins: I was a print journalist for 10 years before becoming a photographer. The first photography jobs I had were in photojournalism. So familiar habits and sensibilities came into play on Matador shoots: the engaging of people, the "hunt" for a story, and the realization when you finally have it.

In the end, a photographer's faith-the belief that images strike us more viscerally than words-informed our approach to shooting. The universal language of the human face and of human movement, especially in a documentary like this, speaks volumes.

Christopher Jenkins and James Morton-Haworth, the cinematographers, were both highly engaging people. They earned David's trust. That enabled them to be present and rolling in the right way at key moments. They also kept to a higher standard of what well-shot footage should be, even in documentary. We really had a very small amount of footage with which to tell the Matador story. The movie succeeds because that footage was spot-on, a huge credit to the skills and sensitivity of the cinematographers.

But without a keen editor's timing, the promise of good footage remains unfulfilled. This is what I found personally challenging: developing the second-to-second pacing, the beats, that do the material justice. Filmmakers need to have a sense of timing that as a journalist and still photographer I didn't need to develop.

Fortunately, there are professional editors who excel at that. They seem to have loads of experience and lots of natural born talent. They understand motion, the way images can cascade in the most effective way.

Nina knew an editor like that who was able to re-cut the film from its earliest version, after the score came in. That made all the difference. It is simply awesome what a good editor can do.

IDA: Nina, you came on board some three years after Stephen first saw the cinematic possibilities in a bullfighting story. He had come to you with the footage that he and his crew had shot during those years. You eventually took on the role of co-director, in helping shape the creative direction for the film. How did this role differ-and how did it blend-with those of the editors in the process?

Nina Gilden Seavey: Documentary, in general, has become an editor's art. When I first began in filmmaking 25 years ago, we shot film. It was expensive to buy, expensive to process, expensive to edit. So when you shot, you shot with great intention, changing magazines every 12 to 15 minutes, and you really thought about scenes, and editing, and structure when you were in the field. Now, video has made shooting cheap-ridiculously cheap, actually. A lot of material is generated that may or may not relate to the central story you want to develop. So what used to be more of a production art has become much more of an editorial art. But back to The Matador.

In the first year of editing, Stephen and our first editor, Daniel Kelleher, worked in New York and uploaded cuts of scenes. Initially the cuts came every week, then every few days, then every day. Each day we would discuss the cuts from the day before and revisions would be made. I'd never edited a film in this way and it seemed odd to me as I am always very hands-on and very decisive with the editor in the creation of the film.

At the same time, we were starting to develop the musical ideas for the score. I had met John Califra at the IFP Market in 1997, and we had always been looking for a project to work on together. I have a long background in music, and music always plays a large part in all of my films. So John and I started working nearly every day on musical ideas, instrumentations, musical themes, orchestration possibilities-everything that would have to do with the "emotion" of the film.

Ultimately, it was the confluence of these two elements: the editorial and the music that changed the trajectory of our work. In June of last year, we had a "final cut" of the film. It was a cut in which you understood the bullfight, you knew a little bit about the culture and the history of the corrida, and you came to know David in various ways. It seemed as if we were done...sort of. And then the music came in from live recording of the Bulgarian National Symphony Orchestra. It was clear that we had not done justice to the passion of the bullfight and David's role in it, but the music had.

So, we decided that we needed a fresh start, and I decided that we needed to do what I always do-have a central presence in the shaping of the story, structure and "feel" of the final film. We brought the film to Washington and hired Ian Rummer, with whom I had edited a number of films, and with whom, over the years, had developed a short-hand sense of what a film "wants and needs." We started over and totally re-edited the film, from the first frame to the last. We had little time and even less money so there was no time for "trying" things to see how they worked. We made decisions with great assurance, never looking back or even reviewing what had come before. It was the craziest film edit of my life. But when we were done, we had a film that felt less like a documentary and more like a "spectacle," and that seems appropriate for a film about the corrida.

IDA: Stephen, bullfighting is something that is so intrinsically immersed in the Spanish culture-although it's under moral and ethical scrutiny now, which you touch on in the film-and has been such a point of fascination to various degrees for artists such as Hemingway, Picasso and Almodovar. How challenging was it for you, as an American for whom bullfighting is not as much a part of the culture, to capture something, and give credence to something that is so visceral and so deep-rooted? Along those lines, how did you both make this accessible to American audiences who aren't as familiar with bullfighting or David Fandila?

SH: I think the drive to create comes from a search for a truth. Artists are seeking to illuminate the truth they see and feel. For better or worse, there is a lot of truth in the Spanish bullfight: about human drive, about human brutality and about loyalty. Not to mention the human instinct to create beauty, ritual and continuity. That's probably why the artists you mention were drawn to bullfighting.

But like most of what we do in our lives, bullfighting is unnecessary and maybe even unjustifiable. In the end, it's a kind of side effect of being human.

We came at the bullfight without all the cultural moorings of those who created it. Maybe that outsider perspective helped. It enabled us to tell the story without falling too deeply in love with the subject matter and without using the shorthand of a culture already familiar with it.

 Photo Mauricio Berho. Courtesy of City Lights Pictures

IDA: Stephen and Nina, regarding the ethical and moral issues around bullfighting, how did you both feel about the tradition prior to immersing yourselves in this project? And now that you've taken your film on the festival circuit and in theaters and have had that interchange with audiences who may have strong feelings about bullfighting, what are your thoughts about the tradition now? How have the reactions been in Spain to the film-particularly to a film made by two American filmmakers who didn't have a visceral connection to corrida going into the project?

SH: My personal attitude about the bullfight remains about the same as when I first saw it: as a commentary on humanity and civilization, it is unique. The movie we made declines to tell people what to feel. We've had reactions run the gamut from delight to horror.

Reaction in Spain has been mostly positive. But the bullfight is nothing new to Spain, and they've been watching matadors and debating the appropriateness of bullfighting for centuries.

What's notable are the intense reactions from outsiders: from people who've seen the movie but also from those who haven't. While misconceptions are vast among the latter group, the sheer intensity of response seems to indicate that this is subject worthy of a closer look.

NGS: Honestly, I'm not a fan of the bullfight, at all. Somewhere along the line, documentary filmmakers came to believe that they could only make films about things they "believed in." I'm not one of those filmmakers. Instead, I believe in culture, in historical transformations, in ideas-all or some of which I may or may not share. I think great films are made about the human experience, witnessed through the shaping of great stories, that you explore without judgment, with your eyes open, and your lens unsparing of the truth. So, from my perspective, whether or not I even like the bullfight is far less central to the amazingly compelling questions of what is it, why is it, what does it say about the inexorable conflict between tradition and modernity.

For me, my personal distance from this subject matter runs a far second to my commitment to exploring what role can I play as a filmmaker in shining a light on this violent, passionate, erotic and iconic cultural ritual. I think my own ambivalence kept the film from being a "pro-bullfight film," but even the role of the "detractors" in The Matador play a minor role to David's transcendent story, which is what the film is about.

The audiences' response to the film has been what we had hoped: even people who dislike or question the bullfight, love the film. You shouldn't have to agree with an idea in order to appreciate it. In this case the story is well told, the ideas on both sides are compelling and the film is beautifully rendered, so audiences and critics audiences are responding positively regardless of their personal feelings on the subject. Isn't the "suspension of disbelief" the hallmark of all great filmmaking?

I think the answer to the question of how the film about the bullfight made by two Americans is received in Spain has yet to reveal itself. Thus far, our super sales agents from Visit Films have yet to sell the film in that European territory. While the film has sold well throughout Latin America, there is great ambivalence in the Spanish market about bullfight films in general, as there is about the bullfight itself. There have been grumblings from buyers about whether there is a paid audience for a film about David who frequently has his bullfights broadcast on television for free many nights of the week. But I think that is a red herring in what is a larger question about the bullfight itself, and yes, perhaps about an "America" approach to the subject. But I think we will be better able to answer this question in a year.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary.