Why Armenia?

This is easily the question I have been asked most often about HERE.  There are many, many answers.  The most honest is that Armenia is where the story led me.  And once it had, I instantly saw that there could be no more appropriate place for the film.

Setting HERE in Armenia was first suggested to me several years ago by a friend, filmmaker Gariné Torossian.  She didn’t make a big pitch, but she did subtly suggest that the country might be an intriguing place for me to explore for what was, at that time, a very vague idea about a road movie I wanted to make.  In doing so, she quietly planted a seed, and she watered that seed with articles about Armenian history and filmmakers like Paradjanov and Pelechian that she sent along later.  Looking back, I think she knew exactly what she was doing.

I’ll admit that for some time, I didn’t take the idea of shooting in Armenia too seriously.  I’d been thinking about other locales – North Africa, Kazakhstan – parts of the world in which the lead character’s satellite-mapping work was prevalent and which were still “unmapped” in the cinematic sense.  However, slowly but surely, I’d find my eye caught by an article on Armenia in the paper or Armenian landscape images I’d come across on the internet.  I became fascinated with the country’s film history and creative culture, while at the same time finding it impossible to believe that something like Nagorno-Karabagh, a literally undefined territory (diplomatically, at least), existed.  As I explored further, Armenia - its history, landscape, location, people and culture - became a collaborator.  Then, when I visited for the first time in 2004, it was almost instantly clear that Armenia was the most precise lens through which to focus in on HERE’s story and themes.  Within the first few hours of that trip, I knew there was no place else to go.

But why was I interested in leaving the U.S. in the first place?  Why travel so far?

Since making my first feature-length film, DUTCH HARBOR: WHERE THE SEA BREAKS ITS BACK in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, I had become more and more committed to a number of ideas and philosophies about how, where and why I wanted to make films.

I decided that I wanted to be going out into the world to bring back new images.  Do we really need another romantic comedy set in New York?  Do I want to be shooting that?  Is that what an audience really wants to see?  Does the world need it?  I became interested in the idea of creating necessary images, necessary stories; bringing necessary films into the world.  We’ve created more than enough unnecessary ones.

These film projects take up so much energy and so many years that, at least for me, they simply must contain a deep degree of personal experience and exploration.  During the DUTCH HARBOR shoot, it occurred to me that even if the camera had fallen off the side of the boat and into the Bering Sea, the experience I was having would have been more than worthwhile.  It was my first tangible understanding of that old (but definitely true) sentiment: the journey is the destination.  Spending the time that I have in Armenia and having the opportunity to get to know and experience its people, culture and landscape has been a great gift – one I now want to share with the rest of the world.