In Conversation With: David France

queer bar in East London.

The most talked about film at this year’s London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival was undoubtedly How to Survive a Plague, a film about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the Act Up group dedicated to saving the lives of gay men. We spoke with director David France to find out more about the film and why he decided to revisit this subject now…

What made you decide that now was the right time to release the film?

Well, you know I started work on it almost four years ago and as I said last night it takes a while for your own curiosity, having gone through a period like that, to drive you back to that period and for me that took about fifteen years. And when I started going back to tell some of those stories, I’m a print journalist, and when I started reporting on some of those stories back then, I was really surprised how little people know.

It was kind of, you though the message was fading away?

Yes. It had somehow escaped the history books. And you know my generation had kind of stopped talking about it. I grew up knowing that the Holocaust generation didn’t talk about what happened to them. And I realised that we had stopped talking about what happened to us. And really you can hold us responsible for this lack of historicisation of this time. And so I thought if people don’t know it and they’re hungry for it then I should go back and begin to tell those stories so the film is part of a series of projects that I have about that period.

Your executive producer had a film showing also, was it called Fire in the Blood?

Right, he’s my distributor Fire in the Blood.

But your executive producer had a film showing about Act Up at the same festival?

Right, Fire in the Blood is about AIDS really in the developing world these days and that was made by Dartmouth Films and they distribute their own films and other peoples’ films, so they’re distributing How to Survive a Plague. Another film in the festival this year is United in Anger and that was directed by my associate producer Jim Hubbard and we worked together on finding this footage and preserving this footage and looking at this period from two different directions to tell these stories.

It was a good idea for maximum impact in terms of producing two films?

Yes, we think of them as companion films. It’s great that they’re both playing together here at the festival and we have done so at other festivals. Have you seen that one yet?

No, I haven’t seen that one yet. I’ve heard it’s showing today –

Tonight. I think it’s the last night tonight, in the studio.

Okay I’ll see if I can go along tonight. And in terms of your interviewees and subjects did you know them personally, was it hard to convince them to take part?

I knew them professionally. You know I was a journalist, not a member of Act Up, although I’m in that footage, you can see me way in the background, in crowds on the sidewalk during the demonstration, interviewing people and just gathering my notes together. I was friendly only with one person from the group and that was Bob Rafsky who died in ’92, ’93, but I’d interviewed most of those people in the past so they knew me, they knew my work and you know I’m still writing about AIDS so I’m one of the few people who’s kind of covered the epidemic from the very beginning. But that didn’t make it easy for them to say yes to come talk to me, there was a lot of resistance and you know I think it was resistance to go back and revisit those years. I mean the hardest person for me to get to come and talk to me was Garance Franke-Riuta and she had a traumatic response to the epidemic and she responded to that traumatic memory by kind of closing it off and never discussing it. And in some ways trying to eliminate it from her own personal history, which of course you can’t do, but it made her not want to come and sit and when she showed up she was angry.

How did you persuade her?

Well she had said yes, and she lives in Washington and I live in New York so I brought my whole crew to Washington, which is expensive, for an independent thing like this and we set up a studio and then it was time for her to come and she didn’t come and she said she wasn’t going to come and she said she had nothing to say and I said ‘you know, we actually took hotel rooms for eleven people’ and I said ‘you have to come, you just have to’ so she came from a sense of obligation but she was angry and angry at having to think about this and angry at having to talk about this and she kept saying ‘I don’t remember anything, I don’t remember anything’ and you could see it in the film how much she knew. This was a person who – there used to be a chapter in the film that didn’t make the final cut, she was still maybe nineteen years old when she formed a committee and an initiative called Count Down Eighteen Months within this group and she formed it with one other person who was also twenty or twenty-one and their plan was within eighteen months, firstly they identified six opportunistic infections that were responsible for killing most people with AIDS and whilst all of the scientific establishment including a lot of people in Act Up were running around a drug that’s gonna take HIV and put it in check somehow, what people were dying of were these other things and no research was going into them. So they identified the problems, the infections and they identified a group of drugs they thought should be tested as prophylaxis and another group of drugs they thought they should be tested as treatments for those infections and they identified those drugs by going through compound literature and through scientific literature.

Yeah, this was the group who were reading solidly.

Yeah, so they weren’t just guessing. Some aspect of development that held promise for example pneumocystis pneumonia or sidoma viral infection in the eye and they identified the problem, the drugs, and then they flew, these two young kids really, flew around the world meeting with the heads of pharmaceutical companies, sitting down with Nobel Prize Laureates to talk about the work that they wanted to see done. And they would get these meetings and they actually made a difference, and now this same girl, now  woman, couldn’t even remember the names of the opportunistic infections. So we were having this really miserable interview, I would ask her questions and she’d told me the night before she couldn’t remember anything so I sent her notes to jog her memory and so I said ‘so tell me about Count Down Eighteen Months’ and she’d say ‘well, according to the notes…’ and it was a miserable interview or ‘I am reminded that there are six opportunistic infections…’ and then I went ‘why can’t you remember? Why don’t you remember? What happened to you?’ and then she went back to the very beginning and just gave me this incredible interview about her own personal journey through those years and through her childhood really. I mean she kept saying she didn’t have a before, really, she was raised by Act Up, it was like her family.

How did she get involved in the first place?

She had been a high school dropout and she was in New York to live in the West Village and a friend of hers who was kind of a teenage drag queen had heard about Act Up and he said ‘there’s a bus going to a protest’ and it was one of the very first protests and they were on their way to an Anti thing to protest at the Centre for Disease Control and it was like a twenty hour bus ride so she just jumped on the bus and it became her community and it became her life and her childhood. And although she’d dropped out of school she was fiercely intelligent and so then she tells the whole story of what it was like to have your family die around you and how when she finally decided she couldn’t – it was in that tension moment when everyone was fighting, fighting, fighting and she finally decided she was going to run away from that family, so she ran to college.

Oh, she went back to college?

Yes, she actually got an equivalency degree and she got accepted to Harvard as a high school dropout to study Medicine. So by the time she got to Harvard she was only two or three years older than the other freshmen but she’d already had this incredible five year journey through one of the darkest periods in world history and they knew nothing about it and she said she never brought it up again.

So it was really simmering below for all that time… In terms of the AIDS plague not being officially over –

Not even unofficially over. Well, actually, I use the word plague in a very purposeful way and the plague is over. A plague is a disease for which there is no treatment or prevention and we solved that in ’96, you know with the intercession of these activists, so it is survivable. Unfortunately, most people, the majority of people are not going to survive it because of access issues. So in a way, the strictest definition of the word plague says it is over. But what was your question?

It was going to be what is your message to young gay men who are having unprotected sex today or someone who has recently been diagnosed with HIV?

Well I’ve never been in the position to give advice before. But in the years that I’ve been working on this film since 2008, 2009, coming forward, HIV rates in my country anyway, among young men who have sex with men, are through the roof, it’s just a ranging epidemic again. Is it here also?

I think it’s about 7,000 new infections a year here.

And what percentage of those are among gay men?

Oh that is gay men.

Oh yeah? Well, what happened in the US is that in the early years it was 100% gay men and then it went down and down and down thanks in large part to the good work that the community did in prevention measures and then it was exploding in other communities, in the IV drug use communities, in the poor communities, communities of people of colour where their connections to the healthcare world was even more tenuous than ours ever was. So the gay transmissions were like 20% or 25%, still higher than our position, our rate in the population in general. Gay men are maybe one or two percent of the population but now in the last three or four years we’re over 50% of the infections again, the increase has been exponential over the years.

Do you think it’s because people don’t see it as something harmful anymore?

I think it’s because, bringing it back one step further, people don’t know about it, they don’t know about the message. They know there’s AIDS, they know they should be doing something, but then you read the blogs and I do, in a kind of perverse way, for young people who have seroconverted and they go ‘I had no idea I was at risk, because I did all the right things’, this is the thing I just read yesterday, ‘I tested every three months’, as if testing is prevention, ‘and I always asked people if they were drug and disease free before I barebacked’ and those are the two things that you are doing, in which case you’re not doing anything really to protect yourself. So we’re not talking about it, I mean QX, are you talking about it?

Yeah, we talk about it as much as possible.

So you talk about prevention, you arm people with intervention?

Well I think the thing is in London there’s a lot of money going into awareness and advertising about HIV but the trouble is a lot of the younger generations have grown up with it to such an extent that they become blinkered to it and don’t even look at it anymore. Obviously in retrospect that question was redundant because your message is your film, in a way, to young men –

But then I’ve never been in the business of prevention, I’m more of a science reporter and so I’d never looked at prevention and tried to come up with new ideas for it but I knew that whatever we’d been doing had been failing. And I know that at least in the US the gay organisations don’t pay any attention whatsoever to AIDS, as though that’s no longer a gay issue when in fact it’s a gay epidemic, and the gay money isn’t going into it, governmental prevention funds don’t go into it. When George Bush showed up as out President twelve years ago he brought with him all this kind of biblical Christian crap about public health that pulled the plug on all federal funds for prevention campaigns and we’ve just left a whole new generation of people out there struggling on their own to try and figure out what to do and they’re not coming up with their own answers and we’re not helping them come up with answers and something has to be done.

Is Obama changing things?

No. Obama’s spending less money, he’s reducing the amount of money that George Bush set up for the distribution of AIDS meds in the developing world. I mean he inherited a nightmare of an economy and a government that is dysfunctional to say the least, but he’s not a man who operates on the passion of his beliefs. He’s got no follow-through and he’s constantly taking shortcuts politically that means that people are going to continue getting sick and continue dying as a result.

So are you involved in any activism at the moment?

No. Nor have I been for years and years, I was not an AIDS activist nor a member of Act Up.

So you see yourself more as the documentator?

I feel myself more as being a historian at this point and you know Act Up had a rule that anybody could be a member who attended two or more meetings and anybody could vote but if you were going to vote there, it was only a show of hands, they asked you to only put your hand up if you were at your third meeting or more. And I was at all of those meetings but I never voted and I always stood at the back of the room and I was always there as a journalist. And I never protested and I never got arrested, at least not intentionally, and so that’s what distinguished me, but I saw what they saw, from the same bunker.

Okay, final question, how do you personally look back at the epidemic now, with what kind of feelings, what kind of emotion?

You know I think that there’s a difference generationally between the way people respond to that history. People like me that survived the epidemic carry wounds and we carry the traumas. Garante may have been an extreme example but we’re all injured by that experience, by the loss and unprocessed grief, people were dying so quickly there wasn’t time to acknowledge each death, much less process them. You know to know as we did the extreme that our government would go to to avoid doing anything to limit our suffering or extend our lives. There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of trauma, there’s just trauma. And it’s hard to look back at those years, for everybody it’s hard to look back at those years at all. And then hard to look back at those years without just remembering, just hideous images. I still live in the same neighbourhood of the city where I lived then and I walk through the streets and I see the ghosts of those years, I see the apartment doors that lead to my friends’ apartments, I see their absence. But younger people don’t have that. They may feel it but they don’t have it, they look back on that history as more thrilling in a way, a community working together and taking on this unimaginable challenge and then in wrestling triumph out of it. I see all that stuff to, but it’s all combined.

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