Alan Zweig

Alan began his professional career as a driver, for 16 years in a cab, putting himself through film school and subsequently the occasional gig in the transportation department of the film industry. Somewhere in there he taught himself to write and got a couple of jobs in episodic television. He also acted in some friends’ films. And occasionally he got to make a film himself.

He decided to try his hand at documentary film when he saw what his friend’s hi-8 camera could do and thought it might be fun to make a film by himself. The result of that exploration was a film called Vinyl which premiered at Hot Docs in the year 2000 and earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of late bloomers. Since then he’s added two other films in a similar style – I, Curmudgeon and Lovable - effectively creating a trilogy which is sometimes identified either as “the mirror trilogy” or in a recent article in Film Comment, as the “narcissism trilogy”.

A Hard Name is his first post-trilogy documentary. He’s still interested in the notion of the collective story but the confessional angle is gone for now. There is no connection between that and the fact that the man who created the “chronically single, negative, obsessive record collector” trilogy is no longer single.

A Hard Name - Director's Statement

A HARD NAME was being made during the same period of the recent U.S. presidential campaign. There was this one time when Barack Obama did something - made a speech or maybe just smiled in the right way - and the TV commentators were talking about how this had “humanized” him. Here I was making this film about ex-cons and at the same time, in some eyes even Barack Obama had to prove that he was a human being like the rest of us.

Another thing that often came to mind while I was making the film was the expression “I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley”. I don’t know whose voice I was hearing when this came into my head. It was probably my projection.

But I was meeting ex-cons with long criminal records, who admitted to having a lot of victims and in some cases a history of violence and yet, in the context in which we were meeting, I often found them to be endearing, sweet, gentle, funny. And vulnerable. And sometimes inspirational, in that they were trying to make changes that seemed a lot harder than anything I’ve ever attempted.

I felt like I was approaching them with the same degree of openness and skepticism I might bring to any documentary subject but I wondered if someone more skeptical might call me a chump, tell me I was going soft, letting my subjects charm me.

And then at the same time, I often thought about how incredibly naïve I felt when I talked to these people. Sheltered. With all that I’d heard and seen on the subject of criminals and prison and everything in between, I felt like these were voices and stories I’d never heard before.

I never make a film without wondering at various points whether I made a huge mistake trying to tell this story. And this one was no exception. But there was never a film before this one that I so wanted to get right.