Nobody Likes Nathan

It was September 2010. Dennis and Otway were in the home stretch. The film's emotional and narrative arcs were nearly complete. But when they screened their work in progress, a serious problem surfaced: many in the test audience found Harris’s behavior strange and disturbing; he was not a sympathetic protagonist. He frequently played with loaded handguns when other people were in the room, kept a gun under his mattress for quick access at night, and at one point spun the chamber of a revolver and joked about playing Russian roulette. He also argued with his wife. Harris had a lot of weapons and he had a lot of anger issues, says Dennis.

The feedback confirmed Dennis’ fear that the film failed to show the depth of Harris' psychological trauma or explain that his injuries and medications caused at least some of his bad behavior. "It was unclear to some people that Nathan was on a lot of meds, and the meds explained some of his behavior that you see in the film,” says Otway.

Otway on conveying Harris' mental state.

Yet without a sympathetic attitude toward the main character, audiences were likely to miss the point of the film. Part of the problem was that in winnowing footage and homing in on the main story, the filmmakers had cut material on Harris’ medication. “There just wasn’t a full story there,” says Dennis. They had tried to convey his pain and addiction to painkillers with a few scenes—a giant bag of pills, poignant arguments between Harris and his wife about his medications. But it wasn’t enough. Clarifies Dennis:

My initial reaction to the rough assemblies of the footage was that it was not going to be clear to the audience how heavily medicated Nathan actually was. He was prescribed the synthetic version of heroin in very high doses. I could see how powerful and addictive these drugs were and the immense psychological impact they were having on Nathan, but I felt I was not truly conveying it. [12]

The filmmakers took another look at footage of Harris meeting with a pain specialist at a VA hospital. The physician explained to Harris the likelihood he would face addiction and build tolerance to his pain medications. But the scene was too expository, says Otway. “It’s a scene that says ‘Nathan has to go to the doctor and take meds.’”

They needed something with emotional impact. The filmmakers had been working with the film’s sound as they neared the end of production, and Dennis turned to the low hums he had created. He experimented with fading out the doctor’s voice in the hospital scene, and replaced it with the low hums. The effect: Harris seemed to be having difficulty staying focused and present in the moment. But Dennis didn’t actually know whether Harris had had trouble concentrating at that instant. “It wasn’t based on Nathan’s internal view of what was happening,” says Dennis. “I never spoke to him about that, I never asked him.”

Using the scene with the altered audio raised a red flag for both Otway and Dennis. For one, the manipulation would be obvious to the audience. When the filmmakers earlier faded in combat sounds to establish the flashback structure, they had added audio. This change would go further: it would remove audio and impede the audience's ability to follow the dialogue. Viewers might question whether Harris was actually zoning in and out. “We’re taking a very active role in how people are perceiving Nathan’s experience at that point,” says Dennis. The filmmakers had to choose: be true to their larger message, or maintain literal accuracy. Notes Otway:

The sound is a cue that suggests that Nathan is having some kind of mental experience that Danfung and I as filmmakers really don’t have any access to. We have to decide if it’s appropriate to suggest that this is happening even though we don’t know. Is it in the spirit of a larger story that we’re trying to tell... or is it manipulative and abusing the trust that we develop with our audiences? We both felt that the choice to distort the sound in this particular scene would have a big impact on the ‘truth contract’ that the documentary has with the audience. [13]

Otway had strong reservations about using the altered audio and felt it would be too much of a compromise. "It would be an obvious and overt narrative construction in a film that had been largely shaped to erase the presence of the filmmakers working behind the scenes," she says. Dennis, meanwhile, was focused on trying to convey Harris' psychological state—and his own—and reasoned that the altered audio would be a way to close the gap between the effect on Harris of pain medications and the audience understanding of that effect.

The Sundance Film Festival’s September 24 deadline was looming, and the filmmakers were still not sure audiences would connect with their main character. Should they include the scene with the manipulated audio and risk presenting a false version of Harris’ experience? Or should they leave it out and risk having audiences tune out the tormented young man and the higher truth his story represented?


[12] Author’s email exchange with Danfung Dennis on November 14, 2012.

[13] Author’s email exchange with Fiona Otway on November 15, 2012.