An Interview With Jonathan Robinson

What inspired your subject choice?

The original impetus for making of this film stems from my having read Thomas' book Down These Mean Streets in 1972 as a twelve year-old.  As an adult, I spent time working with teens and young adults in the criminal & juvenile justice systems. There I witnessed an intense hunger for poems and stories, which would validate the experiences of and help individuals to understand the circumstances, which lead to their incarceration. For myself, in reading Down These Mean Streets as a kid, I identifiedwith Thomas’ frustration and anger as he struggled to win acceptance from family, peers, and society, while simultaneously seeking to forge a unique identity for himself.  I identified with Thomas as I did with Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, the film I saw at the same age, which set me daydreaming of making my own films.  Twenty years later, I met Piri Thomas by chance and, in responding to his proposal “to film his poetry,” I sensed an opportunity to create a work that would allow me to combine all my interests as a filmmaker up to that point to create a cinematic city symphony that pays tribute to the spirit of the urban man-child with a mixture of anger, sadness, and laughter and a swinging sense of rhythm.  The finished film represents my attempt to fuse documentary, narrative cinema, film poetics, and activist filmmaking in a way that inspires reflection on one’s relationship to art, society and self.

What was the most interesting and/or favorite part of making this film?

Piri is not a trained actor or a performer. When he reads any of his poems or stories, all of which are autobiographical in nature, he actually re-lives the emotions from the particular event he is describing. In rehearsals or on set, one would see him time travel and encounter some of the demons from his past. Wow!

What do you hope people walk away with after seeing your film?

For those who have never encountered Piri Thomas or his writings, I hope they will be inspired and moved by his life story, by the way that he uses his creativity as an educator, and to see that, regardless of who we are, we all have similar emotions and feelings when challenged, that we all are together in our aloneness, and that human beings can change.

How can people learn more about the subject?

The Official Piri Thomas Website
Independent Lens: The Life and work of Piri Thomas
Apple Pro Profiles - Johathan Robinson