Amir Bar-Lev

Interview By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Amir Bar-Lev has a lot on his mind. The documentary he directed, My Kid Could Paint That, tackles such lofty questions as: what is art' Is surrealist and abstract art a huge sham' How close should a documentarian get to his subjects'

On a micro scale, however, there's another question no less pertinent: did a four-year-old "art prodigy" who sold abtract paintings for thousands of dollars secretly get help from her father' All these things are discussed in the film, which was a hit at Sundance and is now opening in theaters. In making the film, Bar-Lev followed around the Olmstead family, whose young daughter Marla is the alleged prodigy. At first, that was all there was to it; only later did a 60 Minutes story come out that called the legitimacy of Marla's paintings into question. For Bar-Lev, who had grown to like the Olmsteads a good deal, things got a lot more complicated.

"The film is sort of a 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' story," Bar-Lev tells us. "Really, it's about a juggernaut of fame that sort of snowballs out of control. It's a cautionary tale, about how once you enter the public arena in that way, you can't control your story, other people own your story. I've always felt, if there was some involvement in the paintings from [the father] Mark Olmstead, it was far less a result of greed than it was a case in which that story snowballed out of control. The reason, perhaps, again, this is conjecture, but what makes sense to me is, the reason they didn't shut everything down after 60 Minutes, was that they were trying to wrestle back control of their story, and wrestle back their reputation."

Bar-Lev's most pressing concern was to present an equal argument for both sides and try to remain as neutral as possible, which was made all the more difficult by his relationship with the Olmstead family. "I really felt torn; depicting the Olmsteads as accurately as possible, but I also wanted to depict them the way they would like to be depicted, too," he says, perhaps tacitly admitting that sometimes the truth hurts. "Actually, if I had gotten footage in the end of Marla doing a painting which absolutely convinced me that she was a genius, or, on the other hand, I had gotten footage of her dad doing a painting, it would've made life pretty easy. Because I would know that had to go in the film, and I would know how exactly to portray that family."

Unfortunately, there were no easy answers, and the film shows us Bar-Lev grappling with these issues. "This is kind of abstract, but it starts as a film about the question, why don't people just paint things to make them look the way they look in the real world' Why do you not paint representationally, and how do we value those other types of paintings, is it all just some type of con' But it ends there too, because it really becomes about the documentary filmmaker really having trouble accurately representing his subjects. It begins to explore questions of representation that were the very things that the abstract painters were exploring. And it answers the question, the film itself, in struggling with these questions."

This question - whether or not the Olmsteads' portrayal in the film is accurately representational or a series of editing tricks - is something every documentarian has to deal with. "People have this negative response toward the guiding of the story," Bar-Lev says. "They feel like if you guide the story, you're being disingenuous in a way. There is no not guiding the story...you could never let the story be what it is. Nobody's going to sit in the theater for a year. That would be letting a story be what it is. I took a year of time and turned it into an 84-minute movie. That couch scene at the end, for instance, was two and a half hours long, and now it's two minutes long. That question of objectivity, and being balanced, they don't even really have a place in the conversation. It's really just about trying to be truthful in a different way."

So while a documentary could never be wholly representational, he do believes he has captured the truth of the situation. "What documentaries are, in most cases, they're improvisation. If there were two poles to the spectrum, on the one hand scripting the story and boxing it in, and on the other hand just witnessing it, documentaries are somewhere in the middle there. You are projecting a story out into the world, just like if you had written something, but you have to be willing for the world to bounce something back. It's like sonar or something. And I find that immensely pleasurable, intellectually."

Of course, truthful or not, you're never going to please everyone. In the long tradition of controversial documentaries, the subjects of this one, the Olmstead parents, have condemned the filmmaker and the film. " They are not happy with the film," he says matter-of-factly, but with a hint of sadness in his voice, "and they have made a public statement which you can find online." (The Olmsteads told the New York Post: "When we met Amir Bar-Lev three years ago and he expressed interest in our daughter's work, we welcomed him into our home and lives. But we are heartbroken by some of the choices he made in his portrayal of our family in the editing of the film. We feel the question of the authenticity of our daughter's paintings has been answered. Marla has created many pieces on film, one of which, in Mr. Bar-Lev's opinion, was in keeping with her best works.")

Bar-Lev takes pains to sound completely unbiased and not reveal his feelings about his now estranged relationship with the Olmsteads. But near the end of the interview, he finally betrays a little bit of anger. "I think there's a tendency to kind of use Marla as a human shield, in a way," he says of her parents' defensiveness. "It's a little hypocritical to enter the public arena and then to say, 'Hey, don't criticize our little girl here, there's a little girl here.' Well, that little girl didn't ask to be on 60 Minutes, and she didn't ask to sell her paintings for $25,000. And that's all I can say about that."

Trying to pin down his true feelings about the authenticity of Marla's artwork, someone asks him if he'd be willing to buy one of her paintings. He hesitates for a long time. "I couldn't afford a painting of hers. I do have two drawings that she made me, which I took home and put one on my fridge, and one on my office filing cabinet, rendering them instantly value-less. But," he says, "they're of more value to me as something as a kid made that reminds me of fun times I had with that kid than something I'm looking at as an investment or, you know, a piece of art...I think a lot about what will happen to Marla. But not to the degree that I'm going to do a follow-up," he laughs. "I hope that if Marla sees the film in twenty years, she'll feel that it was accurate."