1006: Documentary Filmmaker Helen Whitney on Filmmaking, "The Mormons", and "Into the Night" Pt. 3
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2018
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this edition of Mormon Stories Podcast, we are honored to interview award-winning documentary filmmaker Helen Whitney about her life as a documentary filmmaker, her work on the 2007 PBS documentary "The Mormons," and her new film about mortality entitled "Into the Night."
In Part 1, we discover that throughout her career, she has maintained a deep interest in spiritual journeys, which she first explored with her documentary The Monastery, a 90-minute ABC special, about the oldest Trappist community in the Americas. Helen followed this film with a three-hour Frontline documentary for PBS, John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, and in 2007 she produced The Mormons, a four-hour PBS series that explored the richness, complexities and controversies surrounding the Mormon faith. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, she produced Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, a two-hour documentary that examined how religious belief – and unbelief – of Americans was challenged and altered by the spiritual aftershocks of 9/11.
In Part 2, Helen shares intimate details about the making of the highly-impactful documentary "The Mormons." She also provides her non-Mormon perspective of the faith and many anecdotal interactions with LDS General Authorities including Boyd K. Packer, Jeffrey R. Holland, and Gordon B. Hinckley that our listeners will find very intriguing.
In Part 3 we learn about her new project, Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death, a two-hour feature documentary, featuring fascinating, unexpected voices from various walks of life: old and young, believers and nonbelievers, the dying and the healthy, well known and obscure. However varied their backgrounds, all are unified by their uncommon eloquence and intelligence, and most important by their dramatic experience of death. Into the Nightis a two-part documentary, with Part 1 available now for streaming on Hulu and for rent on Youtube.
Transcript
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| 1:22.0 | Welcome back to part three of our interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Helen Whitney. |
| 1:32.0 | We've talked about her life prior to becoming a filmmaker. Her life is a filmmaker. The film she did |
| 1:38.0 | about monks in a monastery, about Pope John Paul II. We've talked about her incredible film on |
| 1:46.0 | Faith in 9-11, religion, and then we did a good hour, hour and 15 minutes on her incredible work with the |
| 1:54.0 | documentary The Mormons. And now we are here to plug her latest film which released earlier this |
| 2:02.0 | year through PBS, dealing with mortality and faith. And it's called Into the Night. And it's stunning. |
| 2:12.0 | I watched it in the full yesterday, the day before in Park City. I was gripped. I was moved. And she is here |
| 2:21.0 | tonight to plug it at the Broadway. And she's hoping to fundraise for the second part to this |
| 2:30.0 | documentary which extends it beyond the two beautiful hours that she's already released. But this movie talks about death. |
| 2:39.0 | And it talks about all sorts of interesting things. You interview a mortician. You interview someone who does |
| 2:46.0 | cryogenics. You interview a radical Islamist, a former radical Islamist. And perhaps most powerfully you |
| 2:54.0 | interview people who are dying. And I don't want to give too much away. But they pass while you're still |
| 3:04.0 | making the film. And so you basically frame death or mortality as the great question, the great human |
| 3:14.0 | question. Why, what made you want to make this film and why did you make this film? |
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