‘I look at the footage to convince myself that you were alive’: how Ross McElwee made a film about unimaginable loss, grief and guilt — SkimNews
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- Ross McElwee's documentary 'Remake' confronts the fentanyl overdose death of his son Adrian at age 27, in the bathroom of McElwee's Boston home, after Adrian's mental health deteriorated and he became addicted to opioids.
- The project originally set out to follow the Hollywood fictionalization of McElwee's 1986 documentary 'Sherman's March'; Adrian's death overtook the plan and McElwee chose to preserve the original concept as an 'absurd counterbeat' to the grief.
- McElwee addresses Adrian directly across decades of footage (he filmed his son a few minutes each month from infancy to adulthood), saying he replays the tapes to 'convince myself that you were alive' but also 'that you're gone.'
- Adrian himself was a cheerleader for his father's commercial ambitions, urging him on film to 'just do some big blockbuster hit' rather than stay in personal documentaries.
- Charleen Swansea, McElwee's voluble English teacher and 'the greatest documentary character of all time' per a poll of American critics, returns for 'Remake' now in the grip of dementia with no memory of the original film.
- Filmmaker Victoria Mapplebeck ('On Motherboard,' 2024) tells McElwee she relates to the ethical tensions, arguing that a child's consent to be filmed is partly a gift because they recognize what the project means to the parent — something she says her own son Jim got more from than Adrian did.
- McElwee, now 79, questions whether his 2011 film 'Photographic Memory' — which he worries portrayed Adrian as 'more or less invincible' — fed a false self-image that contributed to his son's drug use, and says he has lost the old compulsion to film.
Why it matters: McElwee turns 40 years of personal documentary into a self-indictment: a father publicly asks whether his camera corroded his son. For nonfiction filmmakers the film repositions consent and representation in family work from craft question to life-or-death stakes, and the article's closing mental-health helplines signal the opioid crisis as the unstated backdrop to every frame.
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