If documentaries about creatives and artists is a sub-genre, documentaries about literary authors would have to be a sub-sub-genre. While being specific, this niche category has plenty of variety. Through the Writer’s Mirror (L’écrivain et son double) is an excellent recent addition into this body of work. 

This interview between myself, director Alexandre Westphal and professor Anne-Laure Tissut took place earlier this year, as part of an academic event in Paris on the American author Percival Everett — the subject of Through the Writer’s Mirror. In the spirit of Everett’s literature, the documentary balances various interests — in art, writing, performance, history and race — and experiments with different approaches to sound, image and editing.

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Anne-Laure Tissut: How did you discover Percival Everett’s work?

Alexandre Westphal: It was a chance encounter. I found Percival’s 2001 novel Effacement (Erasure) in a family library. I read it and enjoyed it so much that I devoured many of his other novels. What most fascinated me was the surprise that came with each book. Despite a number of recurring patterns or similarities, each book was exciting, which was promising for my desire to make a documentary about what it means to be a writer.

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George Kowalik: The documentary starts with Erasure, with the actor — the “double” — heard reading directly from the opening of that book. Then when we are first are introduced to Percival, you introduce him with a guitar. As well as the many different arts he makes or publishes, he also plays musical instruments… but he also fishes, owns horses, more. He’s a man of many interests and talents. To me, there was also a real musicality to the way you approached the film. The way you use sound, but also silence and the space between sounds, interests me. I think it matches the musicality and rhythm of Percival’s prose. Why did you take this approach?

AW: This managing of speech and silence are linked to the structure of the film, which alternates between Percival’s texts being read by the actor and interviews with Percival. So, there was a need to accommodate breathing spaces, breathing moments. This is linked to the way in which Percival expresses himself. He speaks slowly and it feels as if we are witnessing thinking in progress. Another formal aspect I was very keen on was the use of two kinds of images: archives and landscapes. I was lucky to work with Martin Wheeler, the musician. He does a wonderful job with distorting sounds and manipulating them. This became a way to shape those moments you speak of — those blanks or spaces between sounds. It was a way to give structure to these alternating modes of speech and relative silence.

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ALT: I have a question about archives. Did you have a process for selecting those archival images that are neither of Percival nor of the actor reading his texts? They are intriguing and very powerful visually.

AW: My first constraint was the selection of texts. At one point, I wanted to discuss Percival’s poems, but I ultimately decided to focus on his prose — and only his texts that, at the time, were available in French. From this selection, a number of topics emerged. I submitted those topics to an archivist and conducted some research about areas such as lynching and Native American conservation. From the selection of images that the archivist sent back, I then had to work out where best to include them in the cut of the film. Some of the archival images and footage are clearly related to the texts, but others were chosen for the symbolism that can be inferred from the excerpts read in the film. For instance, the amateur footage of roads and driving in the U.S. were used for their connection to the excerpt from the novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013) the actor reads out in the film. Elsewhere, there’s other footage of daily life, which allows the viewer to develop their own symbolical relationship with the texts.

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GK: On your decision making, I would love to ask about how you approached the interviews and how structured they were. Did you go in with a script or some kind of shape for what you and Percival would say? Or was it very free, natural and spontaneous when you spoke with him?

AW: The film was shot over a relatively long period of time. I first met Percival in 2012. We met again in 2016 when the first interviews took place, and there were further interviews in 2018. Early on, I understood what I would not succeed in doing and what I should not do, so in this way the intentions of the film became more definite. For instance, I realized that there was no point in asking Percival to interpret his own texts. I also realized that I wouldn’t get anything about his biography. His own life remained outside the film. So, from an early stage, the film focused on the writer’s job: how to build the book. It was a very practical approach on my part. And even though this job isn’t engineering, as Percival has said, it is still structured. It’s building. It’s construction. 

I also found out early on that it was a good idea — and it was possible — to approach literature from other fields, such as history and fishing. That became my method. I would come to Percival with a general outline, including a number of questions for us to follow. I often also introduced a kind of third turn between Percival and myself — like the maps, or the images of Sidney Poitier — that would allow the conversation to develop around this mediating object. Part of the project was to make literature visible and audible, much like if you’re viewing a painting or sculpture, where the works have to be shown. The challenge was that the texts would not be staged as adaptations by characters and actors. It became a question of how to bring the texts to life. Percival and I had a conversation about the writer’s doubles throughout their work; progressively, the idea developed of introducing a reader into the film, who would be inseparable from the writer. 

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ALT: How did you think about the comic when working on the film? It’s so important to Percival’s work, but what was your approach to showing this in your documentary?

AW: The comic relies on context. It was extremely difficult to select just an excerpt from each Percival text, because the comic effect could be lost without the context. Another important factor when making the film was that Percival’s 2021 novel The Trees had just come out in the U.S. during shooting — in addition to a magazine combining a reproduction of his paintings with this novel, which is about lynching. It was natural that this would come to the foreground of the documentary.

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GK: I have a question about The Trees. You have talked a lot about image and specific decision making on which images to apply to which sounds or readings of extracts. The image that really stuck with me was towards the end, when — during the section on The Trees — the names of real lynching victims start to scroll down a diegetic projection screen that we can see. Percival then stands in front of this screen and the names are projected through him, appearing on his clothes and face. It seems to literalize this idea of what he talks about in one of your conversations in the film: writing the names of these victims down allows them to become real, which is something Percival did himself before a section of this list then appears as a chapter in The Trees. Were these kinds of visual tricks plans that you had before shooting, or were they more opportune?

AW: One of the constraints when shooting was that most of the interviews took place in Percival’s study, which is full of objects that tell us something about him. The space and dimensions of the American West might have been lost, for example — which is an important part of many of his works. So, we had the idea of projecting images on the walls of the study to bring the outside in, in a way… to bring in those images of the West. As to this sequence, with the names of victims of lynching, Percival had told me about his process of writing them in notebooks and said that once the novel was published, he would tear the notebooks up, so the record would be lost. So, this became a way to bring the notebooks back, having all those names projected on Percival’s figure, which effectively brought the names of the victims back to life, for a while at least.

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ALT: I was going to ask you about this. There are numerous — and varied — devices or mirror effects: reflections, superimpositions. Are these things you focus on in all of your films, and was the way you approached them here specific to this film?

AW: It’s the only time I have used these mirror effects. It was a way to show how the real, concrete world and fiction intermingle, and sometimes become indistinct or interact. Using the archives — working on them, distorting them and appropriating them, as it were — also became a symbol of the writer’s work and how the writer appropriates through memory.

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GK: There was something appropriately Everettian about that shot. We were watching someone watch the projection screen. That layering is so interesting. I have a question about the novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and particularly what you were speaking with Percival about in the interviews in the documentary. He mentioned how he watched all of Poitier’s films 40 times each while working on that novel. I was wondering if that was replicated for you and your research process. You have talked about how you devoured Erasure and then read his other books. Did you start to do any kind of Everettian meta-research, where you looked in more detail at the things he researched heavily for the books? Whether for the Poitier films or fishing, which is important in the film — what was your research process?

AW: I must confess that I didn’t read all of Everett’s works 40 times! But I did return to them often enough. I was struck when I watched the rushes back by how often Percival spoke about the research he does for his books. His research into hydrology for his novel Watershed (1996), for example… it’s a recurring feature in his way of writing. But it was a different approach to research for me. Another fascinating aspect of Percival’s work is the fact that he does this much research for his books, then claims that he forgets them once they have been released into the world. This striking contrast between being extremely focused and going deep into a topic, and just letting go… I think it’s effective. 

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ALT: I have another question about the sound and the music. You said that it was a close collaboration with Martin Wheeler, but what were your suggestions and requests to/from him for this aspect of the film?

AW: I wanted the music to accurately represent the process of sound editing for filmmaking that works with archives — specifically, bringing sound to the silent archives. Martin worked closely with the sound editor, and what I liked about Martin was his taste for abstraction, which matches Percival’s. Martin uses a method of processing units of sound digitally, which transforms the sounds. For instance, there is saxophone in the soundtrack, which is not necessarily identifiable. It’s illuminating to work together with a musician, watching them change and elaborate.

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GK: Hearing you speak about the mixed media and different formal approaches and techniques you used, how much did the project change as you were working on it? As you have said, it was a long journey making this documentary. There was a line in the film from Percival about how he often does not know what his books are, until he sits down to write… and then suddenly he has 200 pages. Did the project mutate or change form as you were working on it? Did the thing you first had in mind in 2012 end up as what we’re watching today? What was that journey like?

AW: Originally, I had in mind a film only about writing and literary creation, which it begins with. But after The Trees was released, during one of our interview sessions, the film drifted towards lynching and the anger that comes with it. This wasn’t anticipated. But I also thought that it would be reductive to limit the movie to anger against racism and racial violence. So, during the editing process, much of the structure was refashioned, which is often the case with filmmaking. It became a balance of these different things.

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ALT: I have been raising the question with colleagues and fellow researchers of a possible evolution in Percival’s work. Not to go as far as identifying different periods or stages of his career, but we have observed that there’s an increasing denunciation of racial violence in his recent works. It’s more overt, even if it has always been there. With his 2019 poetry book The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, alongside The Trees and now his 2024 novel James, a concern that had been running throughout his career now comes forward more forcefully. I find it fascinating that your process and experience was somewhat similar — this topic of racial violence imposed itself, but wasn’t your original idea. Do you see this evolution in Percival’s work?

AW: It’s true that the last footage shown in the film, in the canyon and the conversations during the fly fishing outing, correspond with the time when The Book of Training and The Trees were published.

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ALT: I have a question that isn’t mine but was put to me as I was announcing this screening of your film. Many who know of him and his work were amazed that Percival would agree to be shown in a movie, because he’s so private. It’s very unlike him. So, what is your secret?

AW: I must have got lucky. As the film shows, Percival is a very generous person. He welcomed me into his study and gave me a lot of his time. The film aims to share this with you all.

George Kowalik (@kowalik_george) has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature from King’s College London, where he also taught American literature for three years. He is both a short fiction and culture writer, and was shortlisted for Ouen Press’ 2019 Short Story Competition. His work can be found at georgeoliverkowalik.wordpress.com.

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