The artists consolation is that she can take as her subject the everyday turmoil of life and make of it something beautiful, she can rescue from despair those essential splinters of light that go into making a dull thing gleam.
Everything is copy Nora Ephrons mother used to tell her. Considering how the late writer-director managed to squeeze from the wounds of her early divorce the material for both a novel and a movie not to mention a bestselling collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, inspired by the ravages of old age it was advice Ephron was intent on not wasting. And its the gifted artistic strategy, too, of Humboldt-native Nathan Cheney, whose first feature film, A Fatherless Generation, premieres April 14 at the Kansas City Film Festival.
THE 32-YEAR-OLD
Cheney has spent the last seven years peering with a sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating concentration at the arc of his relationship with his father, Craig.
Cheneys parents divorced when he was 6. Cheney remained with his mother, and although the physical proximity with his father was rarely greater than 15 miles, the emotional gulch was huge.
Growing up, remembered Cheney, I saw my dad, but it was sporadic. And when I did see him there was just a total lack of communication. There were a lot of elephants in the room that we werent dealing with. And that builds up over time.
At some point in his early adulthood, Cheney linked the suffering in his own life which culminated finally in a failed suicide attempt when he was 19 with the longed-for but ultimately absent connection he maintained with his father.
The real wisdom in Cheneys film, however, is that he rejects the easy feat of casting blame and abandons early on any search for a villain. A lesser filmmaker would have pointed the camera at his father, asking Why did you ? How could you ? Not Cheney. Cheney trains the lens on himself. And its this, the willingness to peer into the kiln of his own anger and resentment and pain, that forms the movies real moral core.
There was a point when I just thought, Wait a minute, maybe I shouldnt be so caught up in trying to blame my dad for everything in my life until I actually open up the door and start that conversation with him. Maybe I should hear his side first. And that was the process through which this film took me, said Cheney, building up the courage to confront my father face-to-face. I think the evolution of this film through the last seven years is in my realizing that I had to grow up and take responsibility for myself.
Still, Cheneys relationship with his own father is merely a throughline in a documentary that confronts the broader problem of fatherlessness in America. And this includes fatherlessness in all its many guises, explained Cheney death, divorce, apathy, the estrangement that follows abuse.
Cheney conducted more than 100 interviews during the course of filming. He spoke with everyday Americans whove confronted in one way or another the strain of paternal absence. He spoke with mental health professionals and other experts about the psychological effects of growing up without a father. And, as befits a director who cut his teeth as an assistant at Access Hollywood, Cheney has spiced his film with a cortege of A-list celebrities: Terry Crews, Aisha Tyler, Alan Thicke (whom Cheney sat down with only weeks before the famed TV dads untimely death), Billy Bush (the movies executive producer), and George Lopez. (So attuned was Cheney to the narrative cohesion of his documentary that he was willing to let an on-camera interview with Jerry Seinfeld hit the cutting room floor because it detracted from the films momentum.)
There are no favorite interviews, said Cheney each person approached the question of fatherhood from a new and unique angle but his conversation with comedian George Lopez struck an especially resonant chord.
He was my last major interview, recalled Cheney, who conceived of this documentary, though on a far smaller scale, while still a film student at Columbia College Hollywood. I was supposed to have a 15-minute interview with George; his publicist was watching the clock. It turned into an hour and fifteen minutes. He opened up and shared some stuff that I dont think hes opened up to anybody about because he was so passionate about the subject. His father left him when he was 2-months old and his grandmother raised him. He says so many amazing things, information that I think is really going to help and inspire young people.
THE HOPE of inspiring young people is not a hollow concern with Cheney. A Fatherless Generation is precisely the film that might have helped smooth some of the wrinkles in the young filmmakers own early adulthood had it arrived a decade earlier.
Not long after his suicide attempt in California, Cheney returned to Iola. He needed work, and so joined the assembly line at Gates Corporation, his fathers longtime employer. The two men worked adjacent shifts. Arriving for work, Nathan would watch as his father departed the plant. It was the most consistent interaction the two men had had in years. That was the beginning of me realizing that there was something there that I had to confront. I started to see how hard my dad was working. My dad was and is to this day an extremely hard worker. To see that on a regular basis and to see life through his eyes, it really gave me a different perspective. Id say that was the beginning of my understanding.
That period also marked the beginning of Cheneys career in film. Cheney, along with fellow IHS grad Chance Luttrell, created a short documentary, Punch Clock, which took as its subject the factory world of southeast Kansas. And it wasnt long after shooting Punch Clock that Cheney learned hed been accepted into film school in Los Angeles, a lifelong dream come true.
And yet, even while living in L.A., Cheney could never cease turning the facts of his upbringing over and over again in his mind. And so he did what any good artist does: he made of his obsession a virtue, and poured every ounce of energy into creating his first feature.
