But only in the literal sense. It's the result of a collaboration between scavengers in Rio and artist Vik Muniz, portrayed in the highly original documentary Waste Land, which is up for an Oscar on Sunday. A shame the field is so good, film-maker Lucy Walker tells DONALD CLARKE
LUCY WALKER is pondering this year’s nominees for the best feature documentary Oscar. “They really are annoyingly good,” she says. “I am going to have to take out a few documentary film-makers. Ha ha!”
Walker, an energetic young Englishwoman with smashing diction, has a personal involvement with the race. Two of her recent documentaries were tipped for a nomination. In the event, Countdown to Zero, a terrifying study of nuclear proliferation, didn't make the final cut. But Waste Land, a highly original blend of art and sociology, will, on Sunday night, face off against such heavy hitters as Exit Through the Gift Shopand Inside Job.
Much of Waste Landtakes place in the vast rubbish tips of Rio de Janeiro. A community of hard-working individuals, treated with great dignity in the film, make a living from scavenging among the discarded clutter and malodorous ooze. Waste Land follows Vik Muniz, a distinguished Brazilian artist, as he attempts to turn the trash in to images and the scavengers in to creators. Working from blown-up pictures – of Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat, for instance – he persuades his helpers to create giant copies out of rusting prams, wadded magazines and whatever else comes to hand. He then photographs the result from above.
“I had met Vik and we wanted to collaborate on something, but we couldn’t think what,” she says. “This seemed like a real opportunity. I wanted something that was a genuine challenge – something we might fail at. I didn’t want one of those documentaries where people just pretend to be doing something difficult, where they all sit around over cups of tea and say ‘oh, what are we going to do?’ We could really have failed here.”
A graduate of Oxford and New York University’s film school, Walker thinks deeply about her art. If you detect any sentimentality in the director’s films, you can be sure that she, having seen such dangers herself, will have rationalised the problem in to submission. There is, for example, a suggestion that these rubbish professionals – one very well-read, one with political ambitions – are in touch with the world in a way that your average urbanite is not. It’s not as simple as that. Is it?
“No. It definitely isn’t. But there is a related strand there that is powerful. They are really proud of their job. But, yes, they are ostracised. It’s gross. There are dangers and horrors. But it really is preferable to so many alternatives. That’s life. It’s certainly not as simple as saying ‘oh, look at the happy poor people’. If, however, you are stripped to basics, you are forced to basic principles. They are environmentally sound in a way that would shame us.”
Still, any sensitive viewer will be impressed by how startlingly dignified the subjects seem. Far from being tools in Muniz’s schemes, they rapidly become articulate and forceful collaborators. Toward the film’s close, Tião, a particularly thoughtful participant, accompanies Muniz to a London auction house, where they attempt to sell the finished work. His comments on a first sighting of a Damien Hirst piece would shame most art critics.
“I thought it was important to bring Tião to London,” she says. “Look, I am old enough and bashed-up enough to know that people who work in a garbage dump are people who have had garbagy things happen to them. Whatever has pushed them over that causeway into garbage was going to be some dramatic stuff.”
A middle-class woman with a first-class education, Walker is not the sort of person you’d expect to meet at your local dump. Waste Land took three years to make. During that time, the director spent weeks ploughing through the trash. The film gives some sense of the visual overload. But we get no sense of the stench. Did she ever get used to it?
“Oh yeah. It really did smell,” she says. “You’d get these vents that went down to the stuff that was not fresh. That was extra unbearable. Some of our people did claim they got used to it. Our soundman – an adorable guy – would crumple and then pick himself up as he realised he was just about to hit the garbage. He looked like he was going to throw up the whole time.”
Walker, now in her late 30s or so (I’m too polite to clarify), never really thought of becoming a film-maker as a child. She studied English at Oxford because “that meant I could also read about science and about history of art or whatever”. Coming from an academic background, she initially viewed the world of creative arts as a somewhat frightening environment. Her objectives altered when she realised she might be able to arrange a scholarship to NYU’s film school. Discovering that play could be work, she felt she had been unleashed in the world’s most prestigious kindergarten.
It took a long time for her to get her first feature financed. In the interim she spent some time as a DJ and, between sets, made friends with Moby, who has contributed the score for Waste Land.
“I just liked playing records and then began hanging out with musicians. They said: ‘Wow. You have all these cool British records.’ Having come out of that very scholarly background, I felt liberated by becoming this chameleon. It’s funny. Going to Oxford opens a lot of doors, but its also imposes a lot of expectations. You are only supposed to do certain things.”
Eventually, aware that her US visa had the words "film director" upon it, she realised she'd better get something major in the can. The result, The Devil's Playground, became a critical smash when it emerged in 2002. The extraordinary picture followed a group of Amish youths as, during the period known as rumspringa, they experimented with decadence – booze, cigarettes, sex – while pondering whether to remain in the community.
Walker's work involves hanging back and allowing the subjects to develop their own stories. ( Countdown to Zero, featuring excellent talking heads, is something of an exception.) One wonders how she sets about keeping herself out of the action. She's there, but she's not there. In answer, she recalls a conversation with Mary Ellen Mark, the photographer who collaborated on the 1984 documentary Streetwise, about Seattle's homeless youths.
“‘While you’re being incredibly quiet you are secretly taking complete control,’ Mary Ellen said. ‘The attitude is ballsy. When it’s completely right, you are a fly on the wall. You watch the room. But, on the other hand, you are the room’.” Walker might want to try that out in the Kodak Theatre on Sunday.
Waste Land is at the Irish Film Institute
