Interview With Nikhil Melnechuk, Max Powers & Cora Atkinson, The Creative Team Behind DON’T BE NICE

For the most part, the representation of slam poetry in cinema has been that of a punchline, a sincere art form that stands alongside Andy Warhol-esque pop art or absurdist public instillations as the go-to punching bag whenever the esoteric nature of contemporary art ridiculed. Whether it’s Jonah Hill’s pop culture-laced improved slam in 22 Jump Street, or Freddie Prinze Jr’s laughably dated hijinks in She’s All That, a proper and respectful depiction of slam poetry in cinema has been long overdue.

Within Max Power’s documentary debut, Don’t Be Nice, the spoken-word free versing of slam poetry finally receives the rightful treatment it deserves. This popular form of performance art, which allows anybody an avenue to proclaim feelings and thoughts that can be political or provocative (or often both), is what ties together the diverse cast of the Bowery Poetry Club, whose preparations for the national slam poetry championships are candidly documented by Powers and his dedicated crew.

I had the chance to talk with the creative team behind Don’t Be Nice, which includes the director Max Powers and producers Nikhil Melnechuk and Cora Atkinson about how they got involved with the film, the power of slam poetry, the challenges of documentary filmmaking and what they’re up to next.

Can you each tell me about the inception of this project and how you got involved?

Nikhil Melnechuk: I was running the Bowery Poetry Club at the time that we started making the film – that was in January 2016 – which was when we were creating a new slam poetry program at the club. We hired Ashley August, who became one of the lead characters in the doc, to create a new weekly slam poetry series called Bowery Slam. Pretty much after the first week of this series, we were just blown away by the quality of the poetry, the energy, the real politicisation of the art that was going on. We felt like it was an electric event.

I had the idea that we should maybe try to start filming these things and see what could come of it, so we went to one of our funders at the Radio Drama Network, a woman named Melina Brown, and she gave us a small grant to start shooting, with really no idea at that point what it would become. Just knowing that, you know, there was a moment in history that was happening right before our eyes with some incredible new artists made us want to capture it. I reached out to Max, who is a long time friend and collaborator and he had been making a number of sports documentaries over the past few years. I asked if he would come in and take a look and see whether he thought that the project could grow.

Max Powers: I hadn’t been to a slam before, I hadn’t been in the culture at all. So when Nikhil called me up, invited me to the club and asked me to take a look at what was going on there, I was blown away by what was happening. It was the poems, the performances and the honesty that was onstage, but also, as Nikhil mentioned, I had been involved in a lot of sports documentaries and so, because the poetry was scored and that there were teams created, it had that extra element that got me really interested in how how these things come together.

How can you have true vulnerable art being spoken while also having it be scored in a national competition – those two things came together and we just started filming the slams which would decide who got to go into the competing team. So that’s how I got on board and once we shot a number of slams and hung out with the poets, including interviewing some of them, everyone thought, man, we have a feature on our hands here.

Nikhil Melnechuk: At about that time, we started looking for a producer who could really handle putting the whole project together in terms of getting it shot, because we had a really limited window. We had about a 10 week summer where the poets were rehearsing, leading up to the national competition.

Cora Atkinson: I came and I met Nikhil and learned about their project and then was invited to a slam, which, like everyone is saying, is just really magical to watch. I don’t come from a poetry background nor that world, but just seeing what was happening felt really new and fresh and exciting, especially to see all of these young people speaking their different truths. I really want it to be involved so I jumped on board and met Max and we got along really well and it just came to be the right fit.

Why do you think that slam poetry has remained such an effective artform to allow the release and empowerment of both thought and emotion?

Cora Atkinson: I think it’s because it’s so unfiltered. There’s no rules – even though there are kind of standard methods that work – I do believe that, in shooting this film, we saw so many different types of poetry and so many methods that I just think it’s one of those art forms that continues to evolve with the time and people change it and make new rules. I think that’s why it resonates with different generations and people of all different backgrounds because it’s just poetry delivered in a really impactful way. There’s no standards you have to follow, you can make up your own way it.

Max Powers: I think for me, following on what Cora was saying. I think that honesty always is relevant no matter what time it’s in. So I think that one of the big touchdowns with slam is really opening yourself up and telling the truth about yourself and about society, it can be really insightful and sometimes scary as Lauren says in the documentary. I think that that’s something that everyone’s always seeking, which is to have someone tell them the truth about themselves, which is an intergenerational feeling that is attractive and exciting to see at any time.

Nikhil Melnechuk: It’s also the rare art form that hasn’t been commercialised yet and that we, you know, many slam poets are looking to find ways to make it more of a career, to find that commercial aspect in it. But the fact that it hasn’t yet means that it hasn’t yet been massacred by corporate sponsorship and thought police, people are still able to speak their minds.

Was there any major moments that for, narrative or time reasons, you had to cut out of the final edit?

Max Powers: I think one of the toughest parts about the documentary is the number of stories that are possible and the fact that you at the end of the day, you can only tell one. I think the biggest choice that we made creatively as a team, was that we decided this would be an ensemble. We loved all the poets in our film. We thought they were all phenomenal artists in their own right. Each of them could have their own movie, but we decided that we didn’t want to give any of them short shrift and we wanted the opportunity to really look at how they collaborated and how they worked together, especially when writing poetry, which is generally thought of as a solo enterprise.

I think one of the things that’s magic about slam is taking these poets who are used to writing in their own vacuum and putting them together onto a team. I think the things that were really left in the cutting room floor were some of the more personal stories for each individual poet, that could’ve only really fit in a movie about one or two of them.

Last year, there was an article in the New York Times where the Bowery Club Poets took issue with the documentary and their portrayal within it. Has any of their opinions changed on the film since then?

Nikhil Melnechuk: There’s that old adage where all publicity is good publicity and at the same time, I think that was the biggest heartbreak of my professional career. The fact that we were collaborating with our peers. We’re filmmakers, we’re working with poets, we’re collaborating as artists and at the end of the day, some of the artistic choices that we made as filmmakers weren’t universally loved by our subjects.

So that was very frustrating. I think each of the poets had their own opinions about the film, but the last thing I would want to do is speak for them. I think the main thing that’s happened in the last year is that audiences have fallen in love with the film, whereas I think initially some of the poets on the team who were criticising the film have sort of stopped doing that now that they’ve seen how much audiences are excited by their work.

Max Powers: I mean for me, after working for months and months as a team, you always want your subjects to embrace the film, love the film. In this case, it was definitely really hard to have some of the subjects have issues with some of the choices we made. Also at the end of the day, as you’re crafting the movie, you make the choices that you feel are the right choices and you stick with them and that’s the film. We don’t want to speak for the poets either, but also, we feel good about the choices that we made with the film.

What was the biggest challenge in regards to the film’s overall production?

Cora Atkinson: For me, like you see these people and they’re larger than life, so getting to know them and making them feel comfortable in a short period of time has always been the hardest thing. To wrangle seven personalities and making sure they felt comfortable and wanting to film with us. We had a finite time that we needed to do this in, so I think the other major challenge was always time. We didn’t have a year with them or several years, it was this one summer where it was like, this is a documentary and we’re following everything that happens. So it was hard, but it was good.

Max Powers: For me, I think the production was super gruelling for sure. Along with Cora we had our cinematographer who’s incredible, Peter Buntaine, who filmed the movie beautifully. I mean it was the three of us running around on subways, lugging equipment to and from Brooklyn, just really doing it quick and dirty. It was definitely a difficult production, but I think for me personally, with the post-production and edit, putting the film together was hard because what we had after filming was a lot of slam competitions and a lot of our team having amazing conversations in rooms.

That at first was a really daunting task because how do you make a movie with people talking about their art in rooms, that is an ensemble piece. We wanted it to be about the creation of the art and the interactions between the poets, how they build these amazing pieces of art. The post production and the edit was a real learning experience, as there wasn’t a template for how to make this film, so figuring that out was definitely the biggest challenge for me.

Nikhil Melnechuk: It’s about making art about art and the slam poets that we were presented with their work is exceptional. The challenge that I felt every day of the last three years I worked on this is trying to make a film that can stand next to the work that is that it chronicles. To do that, I think we assembled one of the dream teams of film; we have Cora who’s a leading producer in New York, Max, a hot young director, David Lieberman who’s an Emmy award winning story producer, Peter Buntaine, an Emmy award winning cinematographer and Nathan Punwar, who has made a documentary on the Rolling Stones. Like we just had an incredible team and still every day we fought to make it better. We have to tell this story with more passion. We have to find a way to match the power and the energy that’s being conveyed by the poets in our film.

[Spoilers for the film] Had the ending played out differently, would you have pursued their journey into the finals, or still have the semi-finals be the film’s cutoff point?

Max Powers: I don’t know. We definitely would’ve pursued filming it and that’s just the crazy thing about documentaries and especially about competition films is that while the whole team was in Atlanta watching this competition, the movies being written essentially in real time, cause you know that this is going to be the end of the film, most likely it’s gonna end with the big competition. And so kind of what’s going to happen. If they had advanced, I’m sure we would have filmed it and it could’ve worked differently, but I think it turned out that the ending was almost better that they didn’t.

There was no conceived plan to end it there, but when you’re presented with that material, then you figure it out. You work out, what does this mean? What does it mean for the filming, for the poets and for the story that they got to this level, what does that mean about how the competition works and what people’s expectations are and then how does that play into the themes of the film? And so I think in the end it was a great point for them to get to.

Nikhil Melnechuk: It’s almost absurd in the first place that poetry would be a competitive form because it’s so subjective on what poems mean to you, to which poems stand out to you. I think it’s one of the great ironies of the form and it wasn’t lost to us.

That was another one of the challenges that we had, is that we had to help the audience understand what grounds these poems are being judged on and what grounds they could be judged on. And I think, as Max has said before, we tried to set a personal revelation and a personal authenticity and specificity. We tried to use those as the terms, the story behind the story versus the story on the surface.

End of Spoilers.

Can you tell us about the film’s release plans?

Max Powers: We had a limited theatrical release through our distributor Juno Films. We opened in New York at the IFC Centre in LA and now we’re doing select cities screenings. We’ve got a November 14th screening in New York, November 18th and 19th again in LA and on the 20th we have one night only in San Francisco at the Roxy Theatre. Right now, we’re also streaming on Fuse TV, which is a cable network and streaming video platform in the US.

Currently our distributors are working on selling the rights to the film overseas. So I don’t have any information on an Australian release yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as that gets settled. But our current goal is that we’re qualified for the Academy Awards so we are working now on getting towards the short list for that.

After Don’t Be Nice, what’s in the pipeline for each of you?

Max Powers: I cut my teeth as an editor and so as I’m developing my next project – I’m working right now on another feature documentary which I unfortunately can’t say much about – but I’m working as an editor on a feature documentary right now as I’m developing some other other projects and that’s as anyone knows, working on a feature is all consuming for the moment.

Cora Atkinson: I work a lot at RadicalMedia as I’m working on a few documentaries there. I’m trying to pitch what will be my directorial debut for a short film that’ll be independent. And then I’m just working on some other kind of smaller pieces with some other producing partners as well. No rest for the weary!

Nikhil Melnechuk: I’ve got a narrative short film called Hung Up that I produced about a female rodeo star starring Melissa Jackson that’s going to be starting to play in festivals in 2020. I’m also writing a television adaptation of the short film that I directed called Jack and Jill about women in the US military.

Film Inquiry thanks Nikhil Melnechuk, Max Powers and Cora Atkinson for taking the time to talk with us. 

Don’t Be Nice is currently streaming on Fuse TV in America, with an international release pending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjfLIwV2Odk