August 1, 1966, saw the first in what would eventually mushroom into dozens and dozens of horrific school shootings in America. Director Keith Maitland revisits this moment in history in his gripping new documentary, Tower, about the sniper who took the elevator to the top floor of the campus clock tower at the University of Texas and opened fired, killing 14 people and wounding 31 others . “We look at the story of eight witnesses, heroes, and survivors of that day,” Maitland tells me. “Our goal was to honor the untold history and to re-start a conversation around this phenomenon.”
I caught up with Maitland to talk about the documentary and what inspired him to make the documentary.
Awards Daily: You mentioned that you tell the story of eight witnesses. Was that always your intention?
Keith Maitland: Yes, it was. It was a big event with thousands of eyewitnesses. My goal was to create an ensemble storytelling approach that honored multiple perspectives.
AD: In Tower, there’s no mention of the actual shooter by name. What was the reasoning behind that choice?
KM: There are a number of reasons, but the main aspect was that over and over, people who are responsible for creating chaos, they have their stories told over and over again. They’re dissected and explored. The same is true of this one. There’s never been a feature-length documentary on the shooting. There’s been a made for TV movie, and various programs that seek to understand the mind of the mad man. If you search online, you’ll find 300 stories that want to explore the story of the sniper. I felt his story had been told, but the story of the people of we’re focusing on isn’t told.
That’s the story I can relate to. I don’t relate to the sniper, but I do relate to an innocent person who finds themselves suddenly in crisis. How do I respond? How do I react? That’s the film I chose to make.
It wasn’t a decision I came to lightly. We did all of the research necessary to understand the sniper’s story as best as we could. Even after months of research, we were no closer to answering the question of why did he do it, and what makes what he did OK? Once I realized that, I thought, maybe it’s not my responsibility to answer that question, so I didn’t.
AD: I love the use of animation and archive footage in Tower. How did you decide animation was the way to go?
KM: It was important for me to create a visceral and immersive experience. The shooting lasted 96 minutes. When you think about shootings, you think about them in seconds, or minutes, or even split-seconds. So, to focus on the overwhelming experience of being trapped there and being on the campus and feeling that you have no way out, and the animation allowed us to create that tension as well as fill in the blanks visually. Through the animation, we were able to create that tension and set the film in 1966. So it wasn’t an experience of the past, it was more one where you felt like you were within the story.
The entire film is based on fifty-year-old memories. I will be the first to admit that memories are fallible, and there’s a fuzzy nature to those memories. I felt that animation recognized that, and allowed audiences to fill in the blanks themselves. It also has a disarming quality so it surprises people. When you disarm someone, you create new opportunities for empathy. I never considered any other approach, and this was the concept from the beginning.
AD: How much archive footage did you have handy?
KM: I knew there were fourteen minutes of footage as there were three different cameramen on the scene shooting with 16mm cameras. I was aware of those fourteen minutes because they were on YouTube. There was a really great archive in Texas called the Texas Archive of the Moving Image that had collected that footage and was making it available. As we dug into it further, we discovered some other footage had never been made public. There was some footage came from news programs and had somehow been lost through the years, but we were able to get our hands on it. I think we had nineteen minutes in total. We also got an hour long feed from a local educational channel which was run by students who rolled TV cameras out of the studio onto a balcony to film the top of the tower. That hadn’t been looked at since the ’70s. We transferred that from two-inch videotape, and it was so exciting as we were able to see the shooting unfold from that particular angle. It also gave us an uninterrupted audio feed of all of the gunshots. In the film, you hear the gunshots coming from all different angles, and that was based entirely on the actual audio that we unearthed.
AD: From the beginning of the doc, you show Claire and her boyfriend and those three shots. Then you show that again near the end, and you’ve gone full circle and the viewer is struck by that. What was your reason for doing that?
KM: The film is based on memory, and for most of us, it’s about individual moments and flashes. A piece of dialogue or this image that you can’t get out of your head. In talking to Claire and all the people, I asked them to close their eyes and what they think of when they think of that day? Claire said it was those brief moments right before the shooting. There’s something about that innocence of two college students walking across campus like millions of students are doing right now, and anyone of us can be a victim to a random crime or a random act of terror, so it was a way to acknowledge that.
It also answered the what if? What if he stayed home that day? What if he had changed his mind? I wanted to linger on that more, what she lost and what that loss represents.
AD: You have worked with Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. How has that helped you in your film making process?
KM: My experience on narrative film sets greatly impacts my documentary filmmaking because I’m always thinking about ways to connect with an audience on an emotional artful level and to raise people’s eyebrows a bit and to get people’s heart’s racing a bit faster. We, as a guiding principal favor emotional over information. Then of course, the visual grammar of filmmaking that I have appreciated over the years, certainly with Scorsese and others really impact the visual to the film.
My favorite American filmmaker is Robert Altman who I never had the pleasure of working with. I was able to channel a little bit of his approach in working in this large ensemble.