Get On The Bus

Despite what you may have heard, documentary films are not objective, and any documentary filmmaker worth their hand-held camera would admit it. While not always scripted per se, each documentary reflects the filmmaker’s point of view, some more overtly than others. Ron Mann, like all good documentarians, writes his films with pictures of life. In films like Grass and Comic Book Confidential, he chronicled his fascination with alternative culture, not just alternative culture itself. In those films he employed a reconstructive approach that mixed archival footage with interviews, but when Woody Harrelson (who narrated Grass) invited Mann to join his SOL (Simple Organic Living) environmental tour from Seattle to Santa Barbara in 2001, the filmmaker dove into a “real time” documentary, an unusual format for him. But Go Further—crafted from hundreds of hours of video footage—still reflects the convictions of both the filmmaker and its “star” with a fresh, often tongue-in-cheek style.

As with his previous films, the desire to make Go Further sprang from Mann’s interest in subjects he believes are ignored by mainstream media. “It’s like hidden history,” he notes. “Since the ’80s, ’60s culture was dismissed as a failure. I thought it was important to set the record straight.” But the themes of ecology and conservation in Go Further, while widely dismissed as “hippie,” are keenly outlined as very up-to-date in the film. As Harrelson puts it, “You don’t have to be an environmentalist to know there are drastic changes needed.” So rather than construct a stump speech on corporate greed and environmentalism, Mann took his cue from Harrelson himself. “The only direction Woody gave me at the outset as, ‘I want people to feel hope.’ So that’s what we went for.”

One of the film’s great qualities (and a Ron Mann trademark) is the playful humor with which he handles his subjects, such as the transformation of junk-food addict Steve Clark, who pines for candy bars while on the tour’s organic diet, but winds up evangelizing against corn dogs with a bull horn. “Steve was the guy. You know when you meet him,” Harrelson says. Mann agrees. “You can’t not film him.” Such characters and adventures add up to what Mann describes as “Easy Rider meets The Wizard of Oz.”

Perhaps the most powerful moments in the film are when Harrelson discusses his point of view with rankled locals in lumber towns, ultimately winning them over through mutual respect. “ I think the face-to-face makes a difference,” Harrelson observes. “One-on-one you usually find you’re not so much in disagreement.” Mann has a similar philosophy. “I think the key is to create a dialogue. Mainstream media isn’t interested in that. That’s why I make these movies.”