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HBO: Tell us a little about your film, and why you
made it.
Alan Berliner: Wide Awake is the fifth film in a series of films
I've made that explore family relationships,
family dynamics, memory, personal history,
and identity issues, all using my own life as a
kind of living laboratory. In this film I explore
my lifelong struggle with sleep - or to be more
precise, the lack of it.
HBO: Why do you think you have so much difficulty
sleeping?
Alan Berliner: I haven't been able to sleep well for a very long
time, almost as long as I can remember, even
as far back as elementary school. Way back
then I just thought the experience of being
tired - and I mean really tired - was normal,
was just the way I was. It wasn't until I got
older that I realized how much it was really
hindering the way I was functioning in the
world, the way it was affecting my
relationships with people, my work, my sense
of well-being.
Eventually it occurred to me that there was no
point in lying awake in bed, tossing and
turning every night, so I started delaying the
time I went to bed until later and later. By the
time I reached my late 20s and early 30s, I
sometimes found myself going to sleep after
the sun had risen in the early morning. I had
become a true "night owl."
That way of life became an important part of
developing a sense of myself as an artist and
filmmaker, because I discovered that I do my
best work at night. In fact, all my films have
been made at night, when almost everyone
else I know is sleeping.
HBO: How did you make your story transcend the
personal?
Alan Berliner: That's a challenge I take -- the idea of
transforming the personal into the universal --
every time I set out to make a film. There's no
magical formula; each film, each subject, each
theme I tackle requires its own unique
approach and storytelling strategy.
Sometimes I look at it this way. One way or
another, all documentary films are about
access. Someone had access to a person, a
place, an organization, to inside information,
to a forbidden zone - to something exclusive
or special or rare. Whatever it is, this word
"access" is the key. Now as someone who's
been struggling with and suffering from
insomnia and sleeplessness for a very long
time, and as a filmmaker who has always
tried to use his own life as a point of entry
into a subject, I realized that the combination
of being both the director and the subject of a
film about sleep could provide me with some
very unusual, or should I say, very "intimate"
access.
I had access to someone who had been
suffering from insomnia for virtually his entire
life; someone who was willing to work with me
for as long as it took to make the film;
someone who was willing to let me go into his
bedroom with him in the middle of the night
with a camera; someone whose wife was ok
with having that camera in the bedroom, and
who was even willing to use it herself should
the occasion arise; someone whose mother
and sister were also willing to participate in
the film.
This person also gave me access to his
dreams. He was willing to make fun of
himself. Not only that, but he and his wife
were about to have a baby, which meant that
their lives were about to change dramatically.
In short, I had unlimited access to a character
that I trusted to tell the truth, and who
trusted me to tell his story in an honest and
uniquely cinematic way.
Of course that someone was me. I thought
that my first person "access" gave me the rare
opportunity to go where no other conventional
approach to the subject of insomnia had ever
gone. Into the messy mind, and the complex
personal world of an insomniac who also
happens to be a filmmaker.
I challenged myself with the task of
representing the visceral experience of
insomnia from the inside out; to create visual,
verbal, cinematic and even emotional
metaphors that might change the way people
understand the role of sleep in their lives.
HBO: What were some of universal truths that
emerged for you?
Alan Berliner: I came to understand the ways in which sleep
-- or the lack of it -- enters into everything we
do. How we bring the quality of our last
night's sleep into our next waking day. I
hadn't appreciated how the lack of sleep
affects so many parts of our lives, both
personally and as a society.
So many of the greatest tragedies of our time--
the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Russia, the
Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Bhopal disaster, the
space shuttle Challenger explosion, all had
connections to the problem of sleep
deprivation; most of them occurred in the
middle of the night, and/or involved people -
primarily technicians of some sort -- who were
either sleep-deprived from working very long
hours, or simply working when they should
have been sleeping.
HBO: What are some the other things you've learned
about sleep, or the lack of it?
Alan Berliner: Well for one thing, I shocked to learn that
drowsy driving is estimated to cause about 1.2
million car accidents a year, which is more than
drugs and alcohol combined. That's shocking.
In many ways the conditions of 21st century
western culture -- which so often emphasizes
productivity and achievement -- seduces us,
entices us, and challenges us not to sleep. In fact
some doctors say we're living through the
greatest experiment in sleep deprivation in
human history.
You can go back to Edison's invention of the
lightbulb, which completely changed our
relationship to time. By blurring our
distinction between day and night, it opened
up the night as a time for work and for play.
A full night's sleep has now become just one
of many options.
Now take that lightbulb and shrink it down to
the size of a pixel, multiply it by whatever
factor it takes to fill your computer screen,
and now you have another far-reaching
revolution in cultural sleep patterns. That
computer can take you anywhere, anyplace,
anytime, day or night. It's a portal to
timelessness. And whether we live in cities or
in rural areas, it's keeping us awake and away
from our beds more than ever.
HBO: What do you hope audiences will take away
from "Wide Awake?"
Alan Berliner: Ideally I want audiences to reflect upon their
own relationship to sleep, and the ways in
which it functions in their lives - for better
and/or for worse. I've tried to use the tools of
filmmaking to honestly explore the complexity
of my own sleep problems, to make fun of
myself, to push and pull and stretch and tear
and rip and fold and analyze the role of sleep
in my life from the inside out. But to do so in
a way that viewers might also recognize parts
of themselves.
And so this is one filmmaker's quest to take a
subject that everyone experiences -- or at least
tries to experience -- for almost a third of their
lives - an activity (recent studies tell us), that
one in three people watching doesn't do as
well as they'd like to - that is, "sleep" -- and
provide a little empathy, a little compassion,
some new ways of thinking about it, some
pertinent doctorly advice and above all, some
gleanings from the life of an insomniac artist -
who's also just become a parent - and who's
learning to better understand and cope with
his problem as best he can.
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