I last saw Andy a few weeks ago and am feeling devastated, like so many of you. I am very grateful for all of your memories of Andy. There’s some comfort in your words, and so I will try and share some of my memories as well.<\/p>\n
I was lucky enough to work with Andy on three of his films. And I’m so thankful that we got to see a lot more of each other recently when he moved into my neighborhood in Berkeley, often over beers in his beautiful backyard or over post-movie dinners.<\/p>\n
I owe my career as an editor to Andy. When we met, serendipitously through an online posting, he had recently returned from Baghdad. He didn’t have much money to pay an editor and I, having just graduated from college, had literally no experience. Andy took a chance on me. He would pay for lunch to make up for the low pay, and we’d sit and eat on the stone steps by the East River in Dumbo, listening to the trains pass overhead on the Manhattan Bridge. It was clear from the first frames of footage I saw that Andy was incredibly talented and had captured something important in his time in Iraq. <\/p>\n
I remember the first grant we received – NYSCA, I think. We worked straight through our normal lunch hour until around 3pm, and then took off for Grimaldi’s, where we ordered a couple pizzas and got drunk on the house wine, celebrating our new funds.<\/p>\n
Andy was perhaps the most courageous person I know, though he never thought of his actions that way. I remember when we were editing Blood of My Brother, I naively expressed frustration with him for only filming one exterior establishing shot of the main character’s house in Baghdad, despite at least a dozen shoots inside the house. It was then that Andy described laying down in the back of the car when he drove there so that no one would see the American filmmaker visiting this family – to protect them and to protect himself. Getting just that one shot was risky.<\/p>\n
At festival Q&As for that film, he would often say that he decided to go to Iraq while Christmas shopping in a mall. He couldn’t bear that the scene in that mall was what it looked like in the US when the country was at war. He wanted to bring it home to all of us what war really meant for those experiencing it. And he was willing to literally run through gunfire to help Americans understand the human impact of the war. <\/p>\n
A few years later, he was filming for Delta Boys, living in a rebel camp in the Niger Delta, sending drives back to New York every few weeks just in case something happened. And of course, as most of you know, it did happen. He was arrested and held for nine days. But somehow, when he landed back in New York, he didn’t seem that shaken by it all. I think he always knew it was part of the gig. And more than that, I think he felt at home in that rebel camp, finding and capturing stories few of us would dare seek out.<\/p>\n
When I first started working with Andy, I was still too young to recognize what an important place in history and in the historical record his work would have. I couldn’t be prouder to have worked together with him on these films. In the Jewish tradition, we say, “may his memory be a blessing.” Andy’s presence was a blessing to me in many ways, and I know his memory and his work will continue to be so for many of us for a long time to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I last saw Andy a few weeks ago and am feeling devastated, like so many of you. I am very grateful for all of your memories of Andy. There’s some comfort in your words, and so I will try and share some of my memories as well. I was lucky enough to work with Andy … <\/p>\n