Be Good, Smile Pretty: filmmaker interview with Tracy Droz Tragos

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Christine Sevilla

Interview conducted by phone July 22, 2003 with Tracy Droz Tragos, at her home office in Los Angeles, California.

"Be Good, Smile Pretty is a first-person documentary that tells the story of one daughter's struggle to know and grieve for the father she never knew, the father who died in Vietnam when she was three months old. By chronicling her journey of discovery, this film explores profound loss and the need to know, remember and mourn." (1) The film has been described as an emotional odyssey in which Tracy Droz Tragos seeks to understand her father through the rememberances of her mother, her father's family, his comrades and his former classmates. Be Good, Smile Pretty was awarded Best Documentary at the June 2003 IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival "for its brave, highly original approach to a difficult subject, and for the elegance of its craft." (2)

Be Good, Smile Pretty will be aired nationally by PBS on November 11, Veterans Day. The film will also be part of the Fall 2003 Visual Studies Workshop film series.

Christine Sevilla: During a web search, you found a first-hand account of your father's death in a swift boat on the Mekong Delta that moved you to learn more about your father's life. How did it occur to you to record the experience of documenting his life while you were moving through your grief?

Tracy Droz Tragos: The decision to pick up a camera at first was very personally and selfishly motivated. My mother was talking about my father in a way that she had never talked about him my whole life. There were stories that I'd never heard being told. My mother took a trunk out of the garage. In it were things that I never knew existed. I felt an overwhelming need not to have any of these stories or details about my father, not any of them, get lost. I was very aware of the emotional state that I was in, and knew that some of it would get lost if I didn't capture it. Another part of the decision to capture the experience on film was that our grief, my mother's and my own, was still so intense and so raw thirty-two years after my father was killed. There was a feeling of wanting to share the depths of our pain and how much this affected our lives--not to wait until we had a safe distance and could analyze it in a more composed way, but to say "no, this is how messy and raw and intense it is." If it were written down I'm not sure it would have been as believable as simply putting a camera on myself and showing the emotions as they were happening in real time.

Why did you decide to tell this story from the first-person point of view?

This process, this journey, was from my point of view. I wanted to be very clear about that. This wasn't a news story. This was me. This was my life. I felt that I needed to be true to the journey, and sometimes that meant that I had to turn the camera on myself, which frankly I was a little afraid of doing--it's risky and very scary. Of course I didn't want to overdo my participation out of the concern it would appear to be merely a vanity project. I worried it would lose relevance by being too personal. There were times when I, as a filmmaker, thought "this is too hard, this isn't worth it," or for some technical, financial or logistical reason I thought I couldn't do it. But, as a daughter, I needed to do it. There was often that sort of schizophrenic internal dialogue, but I think it propelled me forward into doing it the way that I did.

Can you talk a little bit about your background in film?

This is my first film. I have an undergraduate degree in English--my concentration was fiction writing. Then I went to film school at USC. My concentration there was screenwriting. Because of the way that program is structured, I also had production classes, editing classes. I had, in a very general sense, some filmmaking training there. Then I went to DreamWorks Interactive. I started out there as an assistant, but over the course of a few years I was able to produce and write my own CD-ROMs for them. I left DreamWorks to return to my own writing. I was freelancing in May 2001 when I found the article on the Internet that sparked this documentary.

It's interesting that you came to this from a somewhat naive perspective, a perspective that probably kept you open to a lot of things that seasoned filmmakers might not have treated.

Open to a lot of mistakes, I guess. I made a lot of mistakes. But one of the things I feel very good about is that I told the truth. It may not be that every shot is beautifully composed, and going back I probably would have done things a little bit differently--set the exposure slightly differently so it wouldn't have been quite as blown-out in this moment or that moment, or I might have put the camera in a slightly different place--but the most important thing is the honesty of what's being captured. No amount of lighting or composition or fancy film or video stock will create honesty. Honesty happens in the interaction between the subject and the filmmaker, and I feel quite confident in my success in telling the truth. At times it could have been a little more artful, but I certainly feel like I told the truth.