Ep 903: Ross McElwee & Michel Negroponte

Two great personal documentarians grace the podcast: Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) and Michel Negroponte (“I’m Dangerous With Love”). Long friends and colleagues, Ross and Michel come on to primarily discuss the sensitive subject matter behind Ross’ latest film, “Remake” The film begins a theatrical engagement at Film Forum in NYC on 7/10/2026. They are currently screening a 40th anniversary 4K restored print of his seminal “Sherman’s March”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Vph7D_TxY

The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies — an afternoon trapping crayfish with his son Adrian, age 4; helping with homework, age 11; discussing career plans with his son, age 24. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, “Sherman’s March”, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.

Ross McElwee is a documentary filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. McElwee has made ten feature-length films. “Sherman’s March” won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the U.S Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.”

Bright Leaves premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. McElwee’s In Paraguay premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere Photographic Memory. McElwee has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts and production grants from the LEF foundation. McElwee received the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s Career Award in 2007 and the Pennebaker Award for his career in 2023. In 2024, the French Ministry of Culture awarded McElwee the rank of Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres.

McElwee was Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard beginning in 2003 until his retirement in 2024. He is now a Research Professor, Emeritus in the AFVS Department. About Michel Negroponte

Michel