Director David Modigliani

In 1999, shortly before his Presidential candidacy, George W. Bush moved to that ranch in Crawford, Texas — a sleepy town so tiny that its locals leave their keys in their cars and refer to nearby Waco as "the city." Playwright-turned-filmmaker David Modigliani, who resides a couple hours away in Austin, hadn't even heard of Crawford until it became a part of Dubya's down-home spin. Crawford reveals the years-long fruit of Modigliani's curiosities; it's a richly compelling microcosmic portrait of how the town was drastically transformed once Bush co-opted its image wholesale, instigating heated bipartisan politics amongst neighbors and an alarming influx of cash-in branding and souvenir shops. Yet Modigliani's film is too smart and perceptive to be dismissed as yet another Bush whack, as even when the director found himself in the right place and time for anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan's arrival (along with thousands of supporters and dissenters), his nonpartisan approach humanely and often humorously documents the rise and fall of the era through the faces and voices of our fellow Americans. I chatted by phone with Modigliani, whose film had its world premiere last week at SXSW.

Going into Crawford, you had no filmmaking experience. What prompted you to make a film, and a feature-length one at that?
Well, I first went to Crawford thinking I was going to write a play. I brought a camera down just to record some interviews. When I got the footage back, I realized that these characters — as you've seen — were so engaging, colorful, bright and interesting that a play or article would never do them justice. The footage made it clear that it had to be a film. So I went back to Crawford two or three times and convinced friends who knew how to shoot to come with me. I thought that it would be a 25-minute film. But as the [townspeople's] experience was continuing through many twists and turns, this boom-and-bust arc was beginning to emerge. It needed to be and could be a feature-length film. When that became most apparent was when Cindy Sheehan showed up in the summer of '05 and you had 20,000 people [appear] on one Saturday in this 100-person town. To see the town explode like that, it became clear that this film was going to be longer than I had originally envisioned.

Crawford

Yet Crawford is, first and foremost, a portrait of a transforming community. How did you find the balance between addressing the social and the political?
Pretty early on, I decided that this was a film that needed to be told by the people of Crawford. I tried to keep in mind, both while shooting and editing, that this was going to be their story. The political aspects of the film really come through their experience, their interaction with the [public relations] machine that came through Crawford, the press and the protesters. By focusing on the characters and their stories, I think we were able to see the political through the personal stories.

You've mentioned before that it was like the needle jumped off the record when you first walked into the local filling station. What did it take to gain the residents' trust?
I think when they saw that we were interested in their story rather than Bush's, that we cared what they had to say, they began to warm up. When I came back a second, third and fourth time, and really began to form a relationship with some of the people in the town, some of the film's more intimate moments are a result of the trust built over a couple of years. I think they were skeptical at first because they felt burned by the media, [who] made them out to look backward and hillbilly, with [TV news camera] shots of the bale of hay in the background. When they saw that we cared about their stories and kept coming back, they opened up.